Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1874 — A Successful Farmer. [ARTICLE]

A Successful Farmer.

On Tuesday we were driving by the residence of William Fleet,, of Eden township, and we spied Mr. F. sitting by the roadside on a fence, under the shade of a large maple tree, smoking his pipe. We said: “ Taking comfort, Mr. Fleet?” “ Yes,” said he, “ I am enjoying the shade of a large tree which, forty years ago, I trimmed with my jack-knife one day while! was at work splitting rails at eleven dollars per month. They were clearing up the ground, and cut down many very handsome little maples, when I selected this tree . and requested, as it stood in the fence-row beside the road, that it be left standing to remember me by. It was then not thicker than my wrist. I was then a poor boy, and worked out for a living.” Mr. Fleet then gave a sketch of his adventures in Indiana and his expelience among the Indi-’ ans, in his jqking Way~- How he entered 1,000 acres of land on the Pottawattomie Reserve, and afterward traded a half interest in it for 100 acres where his residence now stands, and how afterward he wanted to sell it and couldn’t, and then i how he shouldered his ax.add waded into : the forest and felled the timber on twenty acres. The relation of this bit of j personal history was interesting, and i more so since we know that forty-three i years after Mr. Fleet trimmed that little ‘ maple tree, while he was mauling rails ; at the small wages of eleven dollars per • month, he sits comfortably smoking his | pipe under the same free, which is now ■ more than two feet in diameter at the : trunk, and surveys over 1,100 acres of ’ well improved and fertile land, worth I SIOO per acre. He does more: he counts Ins flocks by the thousand and his herds by the hundreds, his bushels by the thousands and his wealth by the hundred thousands. All the result of hard labor, honesty and economy. All in forty years.— Tiffin (Ohio) Star.

Milkers, stop dipping your fingers in the bucket of milk and wetting the cow’s teats: of all dirty habits this is the worst. ~ , A Yew Hampshire woman when dying toade her husband swear on the Bible that he would never marry a woman with a sharp nose. The fashionable color for old agew* Sage green.