Trotwood's Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, December 1905

So old Solomon could not resist the Influence of beauty, his namesake of old fell at the same place.

I think you have established the origin of the pacing horse. Poor fellow, he has fought his way to fame, but like nature’s gentleman,

“He may not have ancestral fame His pathway to illume; The sun that flings the brightest ray May rise from mist and gloom.”

After all, it is the irrepressive in either man or horse that makes him great.

When you see a man go to work because he must do something, very likely you will never hear about him or the work; while another goes at a work because it is something he must do, then look for something great.

This will hold good in regard to the newspaper jingle you spoke of, written by someone anxious to see his name in print. Burns could not help writing about Mary, and so immortalized the name a second time. I venture the assertion, Trotwood’s Monthly is not written because he must do something, but rather because it is something he must do.

And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been written on the like subject hitherto.

I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr. Stone granted you when you shot first.

Sincerely yours,

ROBT. HAMILTON.

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The publisher of a disreputable sheet in New York, which makes its living by holding up society and dishing out scandal about men and women, has sued that splendid and fearless paper, Collier’s Weekly, for libel, the occasion of the exposure by Collier’s was a venomous attack by the sheet aforesaid upon the President’s daughter. Collier’s, with its characteristic ability, laid the sheet open to its knife, showing how it held up people for hush money and lived in the gutters of things bad. For all of which it was sued for $100,000 by the aforesaid sheet. In a recent editorial on the subject, Norman Hapgood, the able editor of Collier’s, says: “Men submit to blackmail to protect their wives and sisters from such sheets as this, for in the North the pocketbook has replaced the pistol.”

The South, to people who do not know her, has many faults. One of these is the quickness and certainty with which her men have always meted out tragic justice to the brute, black or white, who tears down the barrier between his own vile passions, whether of malice or murder, and a woman’s purity. Nor has any court or any jury ever convicted the man who used his pistol to protect the name of his women. In such cases, the law considers the man to be temporarily insane, at the sudden destruction of his home and happiness, and though it also recognizes what is called “cooling time” for such frenzy, an old Georgia judge years ago expressed the sentiment of the entire South on this subject when he declared in such a case that “cooling time with this court means ninety-nine years.”

Many sheets of the kind mentioned have tried to build their foul nest in the South, forgetting that here the pocketbook is not the god it is where people live only for money. Its end is invariably the same and the curtain drops to the rapid fire of pistol shots, “and the rest is silence.”

This has come from the old South which taught that money was not all of life, that a man’s word was his bond and a woman’s good character her crown. And words being bonds, men were careful of them, for the man who has to redeem his words with his pistol instead of his pocketbook is more careful how he uses them. We wish Collier’s a speedy vindication. Indeed, we predict the trial will prove something of the same kind of a farce as that of the windy Prof. Trigg, of the Chicago University, who taught the classes that Rockefeller was greater than Shakespeare, that our hymns were all doggerel and much else that was false. He was unwise enough to bring suit for libel against a New York daily which held him up to ridicule. On trial he proved by his own testimony that he was even more ignorant and ridiculous than the defendant had supposed.

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And we appreciate greatly the letter below from so distinguished a source as Mr. Spillman, in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Washington, D. C.:

Mr. John Trotwood Moore, care Trotwood Publishing Co., Nashville, Tenn.

My Dear Sir: Your favor of October 19 has remained unanswered thus long on account of my absence from the office.

I have read the copy of Trotwood’s Monthly with a great deal of interest, and wish to congratulate you on its high character. You are certainly striking out in a new line compared with our present agricultural literature. None of our farm papers have heretofore attempted the literary excellence of Trotwood’s Monthly, confining themselves more particularly to the instructional side of farming. I am much interested in your venture and hope that it may meet with the highest success. Our farmers have been a little too much inclined to look at the financial side of their business and they need something that will help in other directions. This you seem to be able to give.

While reading your magazine I was struck by the fact that my own work has nearly all been directed toward the financial side of farming, but you have given me a new idea and one which I hope will have its effect upon my future work. I shall take pleasure in sending you once in a while anything I may be able to write which I think will be of interest to your readers.

Wishing you the highest success, I am

Yours very truly,

W. J. SPILLMAN, Agriculturist.

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A man named Fessler, who ran an apiary in the North, conceived the idea of making honey the year round. In the fall he loaded his hives upon a flatboat and floated to the land of perpetual sun. But the bees, finding it always summer, ceased to lay up honey at all and Fessler had his expense for his experience.

Lessons are easily drawn from a thing like this. Since the world was made, the experience of life is the nearer the sun the less the work. But the real lesson is deeper. Cannot the farmer who works the soil year in and year out, with no chance for a rest and no returns to the soil see it?

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We want a good live agent in every town in the United States for “Trotwood’s Monthly.” Write for terms to agents. Address Trotwood Publishing Company, Nashville, Tenn.

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CHEAPER RATES SOUTHWEST.

Less than one-way fare for the round trip on Oct. 3 and 17, Nov. 7 and 21, Dec. 5 and 19. To points in the Southwest, via Memphis or Cairo, and Cotton Belt Route.

You can afford to go now, nearly as cheap traveling as staying at home.

Write for maps and literature on Southeast Missouri, Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, Texas. Also cost of tickets, time of trains, etc.

W. G. ADAMS, T. P. A., Nashville, Tenn. E. W. LaBEAUME, G.P. & T.A., St Louis. COTTON BELT ROUTE.