THE COLONEL TAKES THE FIELD
Every Iowa county has its Farmers’ Institute. Usually it is held in the county seat, and is a gathering of farmers for the ostensible purpose of listening to improving discussions and addresses both instructive and entertaining. Really, in most cases, the farmers’ institutes have been occasions for the cultivation of relations between a few of the exceptional farmers and their city friends and with one another. Seldom is anything done which leads to any better selling methods for the farmers, any organization looking to cooperative effort, or anything else that an agricultural economist from Ireland, Germany or Denmark would suggest as the sort of action which the American farmer must take if he is to make the most of his life and labor.
The Woodruff District was interested in the institute however, because of the fact that a rural-school exhibit was one of its features that year, and that Colonel Woodruff had secured an urgent invitation to the school to take part in it.
“We’ve got something new out in our district school,” said he to the president of the institute.
“So I hear,” said the president—“mostly a fight, isn’t it?”
“Something more,” said the colonel. “If you’ll persuade our school to make an exhibit of real rural work in a real rural school, I’ll promise you something worth seeing and discussing.”
Such exhibits are now so common that it is not worth while for us to describe it; but then, the sight of a class of children testing and weighing milk, examining grains for viability and foul seeds, planning crop rotations, judging grains and live stock was so new in that county as to be the real sensation of the institute.
Two persons were a good deal embarrassed by the success of the exhibit. One was the county superintendent, who was constantly in receipt of undeserved compliments upon her wisdom in fostering really “practical work in the schools.” The other was Jim Irwin, who was becoming famous, and who felt he had done nothing to deserve fame. Professor Withers, an extension lecturer from Ames, took Jim to dinner at the best hotel in the town, for the purpose of talking over with him the needs of the rural schools. Jim was in agony. The colored waiter fussed about trying to keep Jim in the beaten track of hotel manners, restored to him the napkin which Jim failed to use, and juggled back into place the silverware which Jim misappropriated to alien and unusual uses. But, when the meal had progressed to the stage of conversation, the waiter noticed that gradually the uncouth farmer became master of the situation, and the well-groomed college professor the interested listener.
“You’ve got to come down to our farmers’ week next year, and tell us about these things,” said he to Jim. “Can’t you?”
Jim’s brain reeled. He go to a gathering of real educators and tell his crude notions! How could he get the money for his expenses? But he had that gameness which goes with supreme confidence in the thing dealt with.