T

HE new two-year course in agriculture added to the old four-year course, has removed all doubt that the work of training farmers in their work is reaching down to the poorest boys in the country, and really providing education for those who need it most.. The entrance requirements are made so low that the boy, seventeen years of age or older, who has had only an eighth-grade or district-school education may enter.

Being given the opportunity all too long denied them to make good, what is the result; that is, to what extent do boys diverted from idleness on the farm or in the city take up useful occupations?

A canvass recently taken in one of the big, rich Mid-Western States is typical and conclusive. Scores of boys had been sent from the college to the farms with inspiration and training to help them 'to success. Nor were they all farm boys, by any means; many were from the city,

diverted to the furrow from the poolhall, to the feed-lot from the bar-room. Of the students now enrolled in the course, ninety-nine per cent are intending to take up actual farming, while seventyeight per cent propose to farm in their home State. With three exceptions every boy who has been in the two-year course in this State is now engaged in actual farming. One of the three exceptions is a cattle buyer in the Chicago Stockyards, another is foreman of the agronomy farm at the college where he was educated, and the third is in dairytesting work. Not only are the others farming, and making a success thereat, but they are taking the lead in the movement for improved country life, as secretary of the local Farmers' Institute, president of the Community Agricultural Club, secretary of the School Board, teacher in Sunday School, and so And these are young men who, as boys, confronted a life of little practical

on.

Thirty-six per cent, or 207, are actively engaged in farming, while eleven per cent, or 64, are engaged in other lines of agriculture, in which are included agricultural journalism, and similar activities closely linked with farming. In addition, three per cent are engaged in creamery work and an equal number in forestry, comprising a total of 35; while four per cent, or 22, are in experiment station, and nine per cent, or 49, in extension work. If we group together all the various branches of agriculture (including both the active, practical work in the field and the theoretical work in the class-room and the laboratory) we have 377 out of a total

money expended is bringing good and tangible returns.

"It is probable," comments Prof. L. H. Bailey, for ten years dean of the Agricultural College at Cornell, "that the proportion of students of the leading colleges of agriculture

of 576, or sixty-six per cent, engaged in the work for which their college course fitted them. The census showed only eight per cent, or 47, engaged in business other than agriculture, the remaining twenty-six per cent being engaged in teaching and post graduate work.

Here, then, we have one out of every three students who completed the entire four-year course in agriculture carrying on actual, active farming-in the field, and two out of every three making some form of agriculture, in its many and varied phases, their life work. The showing would indicate that the agricultural colleges are well worth while, that the

the showing made by the agricultural colleges in their work to reclaim the million-strong army of boys-by the two-year and four-year courses, the short course of a few weeks in midwinter and the extension work which brings the the college to the boy in his own home is evidenced by the stories which some of the graduates tell. Here is a typical one from a graduate of the Agricultural College of Idaho, at Moscow, who started with nothing, now owns a sixty-five-hundred-acre ranch and frankly gives the college credit for all that he has done.

"I had a little money saved up," says this college farmer. "I added to it by

selling books and nursery stock for a year, when I went to the State Agricultural College for four years, using what money I had and what I could earn by sawing wood and doing all sorts of odd jobs. During vacations I worked as a hired man on the farms and once, when my cash ran out, I was compelled to miss a term at college and teach a winter term of country school.

"After I quit the agricultural college I worked several years in different places as a hired man. I always tried to do my work well, take an interest in the business, and work to my employer's best interests. I tried to see how well I could earn my wages. I found I could often make or save dollars for my employer with very little and sometimes no extra effort. I was never without a job and nearly always got more than the customary wages.

"The first money I saved from my wages after I quit school I invested in a pair of good yearling fillies. I paid $80 for them and hired them kept until they were past three years old, when I sold them for $300 and pocketed a good profit. I put this money at interest, as I had enough wages due me to buy another pair. When these were old enough to make a team I had enough to buy a farming outfit and get married. We rented a place, paying cash rent. We raised bumper crops the next two years, fed everything into stock, mostly hogs. This brought us more money than to have sold the crops unfed.

"After two years we had enough to make a good payment on an 80-acre farm by selling what stock we had accumulated, except a pair of good mares that raised colts each year and did all our farm work, a couple of brood sows, and a milch cow. Crops were not so good for a couple of years. The cholera took

all our hogs. We had a good deal of sickness and doctor bills. It took three years to finish paying for our farm. We afterwards bought until we had 220 acres."

From then on it was a case of ups and downs, but usually forging ahead a little each year; going into debt in order to buy more land or more stock, and economizing until the debt was paid off, when the performance was repeated all over again, and so on, one place after another, until today there is a ranch of sixty-five hundred acres, clear of debt, and the highway toward prosperity looks broad and smooth, indeed, thanks to the training secured at the agricultural college. If this is the case of merely one, what must be the story in the aggregate, with 377 graduates out of 576 in one State alone putting their college training into actual practice?

"It's the old, old story of the man behind the hoe or the plow, just the same as the man behind the gun," comments the dean of one of the big agricultural colleges of the country. "The human equation is the big factor. But we have learned that the agricultural colleges do not educate away from the farm, but back to it, in the great majority of cases."

The graduate, without money or parents to start him, usually makes the rounds from farm hand to tenant and from there to farm owner, buying on the installment plan and bearing a burden of debt for many years. But he has been taught in college how to make two ears of corn grow where but one grew before, how to breed up and build up better herds than his neighbor; so slowly, but surely, he forges ahead until he becomes as the reports show-the president of the Farmers' Institute, the secretary of the Farmers' Club, the leading farmer of the entire community.

M

AJESTIC harmonies overwhelm the fashionable audience gathered to hear the great composition; the musicians are thrilled by the power of their concerted work; the conductor has forgotten himself in the ecstasy of power he holds over the minds and hearts of those present in the hall. It is a musical triumph.

Over the heads of the musicians stretches a gauze screen, and across this screen play many-colored lights, blending, sweeping onward in overpowering beauty. This is the color-screen, which plays the symphony by means of different shades of light, just as the orchestra expresses the composer's thought by means of notes. A magnificent crescendo in the horns -the dull red glow on the screen strengthens and bursts forth from among the blues and violets-a lurid glare that expresses the same agony of soul that brought forth the agonized prayer in the music. The music sweeps on, then dies away into an ominous muttering in the strings. The screen shows blues and grays, with little flashes of green. A lightning streak of yellow flashes across the curtain -then another, and another. A woman leans back in her

seat, and murmurs "Trumpets!-Trumpets!"

This is the new "music by colors" which has been performed in connection with orchestral performances during the past season. An instrument which pro

duces musical color instead of sound received its first trial recently in New York, when it was used by the Russian Symphony Society in the production of "Prometheus" by Scriabine, the late Russian composer, who has written into the score of this symphony a part for the color organ or "clavier a lumieres". Other productions have been given elsewhere in the country, and all have aroused considerable interest.

The theory of color music is that the seven primary colors form the basis for a scale and can be wrought into artistic effects harmonizing with music. Scriabine's dream was to build a palatial theater so contrived that the audience should be bathed in rhythmical light as it listened to music. The medium of color effect when it received its first trial was two series of gauze strips about eight feet by ten, hung at the back of the stage ten feet from the floor. As soon as the music began, this gauze rectangle became animated by flowing

the