the half mile, $65; other incidentals bring the cost up to about $350. The total installation costs less than a hired man for a year.

Ten miles east of the Van Wagenen farm, near Howe's Cave, is located the home of Frank Casper. Fifteen years ago Mr. Casper purchased for $50 a small dynamo and a quantity of electrical fixtures at a sale in Binghamton. He installed the dynamo in his sawmill and wired his own house for electricity. Every night since then this little generator has been producing a continuous current of electricity, with no further attention than an occasional oiling, to light the large country home and all the outbuildings. Through the kindness of Mr. Casper a nearby church is also illuminated, and even the streets of the tiny settlement are nightly ablaze with electric lights. The actual cost of this current is practically nothing. The dynamo and turbine paid for themselves more than a dozen years ago. Besides for lighting purposes the current is used to drive small motors and to heat the vulcanizer in the garage as well as to charge the storage battery in the automobile.

has so much cheap electricity that the current is transmitted to Worcester, five miles away, and to Richmondville, seven miles away, and sold to light the streets and homes of the sister villages.

In a number of communities where there is abundant water-power and the farms are close together the farmers have joined issues and erected a mutual plant, dividing the cost of building and maintenance in proportion to the amount of electricity used. The surplus is easily transmitted and sold to more distant neighbors.

At Little Falls, N. Y., the milking at several dairies is done by electric power operating milking machines. The stables are electric lighted, and small motors do the farm work.

In the great West, where water is very scarce, a number of farmers are utilizing their windmills to generate current for light and power. A storage battery is provided to store away enough electricity to last a day or two in case the wind fails. At Noblesville, Ind., a man has constructed a plant which is a combination of both wind and water power. The fourteen-foot windmill drives a plunger pump which delivers water to a hydraulic accumulator. This water, under constant pressure of seventy-five pounds, is used to drive a one-half-horsepower turbine waterwheel direct connected to a one-quarter-horsepower dynamo. This plant develops only enough current for household purposes. In the California plains, far from other power source, even the sun is harnessed to develop electrical power for farm work. Huge reflectors follow the course of the sun and focus the rays on a boiler. The steam is conveyed to a small engine which drives the generator.

The great plantations of South America, the tiny farms of the Swiss Valley, the tea and cotton fields in India, the ranches of the African veldt, as well as the farms in the United States, are beginning to use electricity for agricultural purposes.

exist in towns of less than 5000 inhabitants; 1466 are located in villages of less than 1000 inhabitants. The total output of these stations is 5,000,000,000 kilowatts a year. Besides these figures 193 towns and villages are supplied with electricity from neighboring plants.

THE PRODIGAL RETURNS WITH NEW IDEAS.

In the past fifty years a steady stream of country people has poured into the cities; now the pendulum is swinging back and the city people are flocking to the country. The city men and women bring with them their love for city comforts and, fortunately for the development of water-power, have not forgotten all their old-time hatred of farm work. Being infused with these new and advanced ideas, the country districts are making progress as never before. Telephone lines are stretching to nearly every farm all over the country. The pasture streams are being harnessed to do the farm work, blooded stock prevails, and crops are cultivated upon scientific principles. It is the young men who are doing these things,-the young men with a modern education, their minds rich with the knowledge and enthusiasm of this progressive age.

The former residents of the city grasp and understand new things better and quicker than their country neighbors. Electricity is so common to the urban householder that he gives it never a thought when he presses the button for light, heat, or power; but to the majority of the country people the strange properties of electricity are almost as much of a mystery as they were to the priests of Magi in Zoroaster's time.

PROF. CHARLES P. STEINMETZ.

(Who says that water-power will keep us from

freezing and do our work when the coal supply is exhausted.)

In one of the little villages in New York State, where electric lights were being installed from a neighboring waterfall, an elderly woman was badly frightened because the electric-light wires passed her house. Her neighbors had talked of the dangers of electricity to such an extent that she was afraid of the insulated wires, which she thought contained all the power of the very lightning. Other residents of the settlement would not have their houses wired until they saw how

their friends. As a matter of fact, there is not the slightest danger of being seriously hurt by a 110-volt, or ordinary lighting, circuit.

CITY COMFORTS IN THE COUNTRY VILLAGES. The haven of rest for the farmer seems to be a snug little cottage in some rural village where the taverns and stores are always open, where the shade is deep and cool in summer, the sun warm and pleasant in fall and spring, and the nights are quiet withal. Nine-tenths of the population of such country villages, up to a thousand people, and over, is made up of retired farmers and their families. These residents have money enough to be free from care and they want to enjoy all the comforts of life. Fortunately, these little villages are nearly always located in the midst of a wealth of natural resources. The spring water of the hills is confined in a small lake and piped to the village to be distributed at a trifling cost to the various houses and to offer the very best fire protection. These municipal water systems depend upon gravity for the pressure, and cost nothing to run except for occasional repairs. In nearly every instance the introduction of the water system is followed by sewers, either installed by the village, if it is incorporated, or by individuals. The telephones leading out to the various farms are centered

install electric lights. Frequently the electric apparatus is purchased by some mill owner who finds himself with plenty of cheap water-power on hand and very little mill work for it to do. Or, in these days of reinforced concrete, dams are easily and cheaply constructed. Where the fall is only about six feet a dam of the "flow" type is erected, and if the fall is as great as forty-five feet the smallest turbines are sufficient. greater the fall the less water required for a given horsepower. Once the dam is ready the generator is installed, direct connected to a modern turbine water-wheel, and lo! the tiny settlement is soon ablaze with electric light and vibrant with electric power.

The

Good roads, good water, and plenty of cheap electricity for the interurban trolley, the electric lights and the motors, combined with a wealth of pure air and fresh food, make the country an ideal place in which to live. The suburban areas about every city are creeping further and further into the rural districts. Each day the countryman becomes more citified as he rubs shoulders with his urban neighbor, and the things which once were thought extravagant luxuries for the wealthy city people are now deemed proper necessities to be enjoyed by all.

Such are the magical changes brought to the country by electricity in the past fifteen years.

ASUDDEN squall on Saskatchewan River drove our canoe in on the north shore for shelter at what looked like a half-breed's ranch-house. For fifty miles above there had not been a sign of life or settlement. For twenty-five miles below,-we below, we afterward found, there was not a neighbor. The nearest railroad must have been at least forty-five miles away. As we scrambled up the muddy river banks and crossed the barnyard toward a mud-wattled log house, with staring blindless windows on each side the central door, we were perfectly confident this was the domicile of some Indian or halfbreed rancher come so far afield to have free pasturage. The yowl of mongrel dogs that greeted us strengthened this expectation; but when the door opened, there stood no swarthy native! At this very Back of Beyond, under as adverse circumstances as you can imagine for a tenderfoot, the door opened on a typical English factory hand. I might

almost say, on a type of generations of factory workers, warped in body, dwarfed of brawn and brain, with the spindly limbs and bulging forehead that come from only one thing,-years of emaciation, of under-pay, and poor food, and, sometimes, no food at all.

Inside the house was one single big room, down the center of which ran a home-made table covered with the cluttered food and dishes of a week's bachelordom piled up for Sunday cleaning. There was a stove and there were a few chairs. Of beds, none was visible; only a pile of rugs to be used on the floor for the night.

The boy who opened the door was one of half a dozen brothers who came out from England four years ago, when the great agitation of the unemployed first began to be so serious in all parts of the British Isles. They had come so far afield in order that they might homestead adjoining quarter-sections and might all live in one house. When they

A TYPICAL ENGLISH FAMILY BOUND FOR CANADA.

arrived they had less than $1000 all told, that is, the capital of each represented barely $150. They had belonged to that great and increasing class of people in England,-unskilled laborers,-whose savings can never under any possible circumstances exceed a few hundred dollars, and who constantly live on the ragged edge of the Great Abyss, for the simple reason that any temporary stoppage of work will topple them over the edge into destitution. They had been of the class which,-Canadian labor unions declare, ought never to be allowed to enter the Dominion, because they can never make good and only cut the wages of skilled labor below the the living standard. They were exactly representative of the class whom Canadian charity organizations protest against admitting to Canada, because out of work during winter in Canada means death, or support at some one else's expense.

Yet this family of English boys has negatived every prediction regarding their class. They have not crowded to the already over

crowded cities. They have not entered into competition with artisan labor, and have not cut wages to a sweatshop basis. They have not added to the winter's unemployed, and they have not fallen back on charity for support. They have made good. Each boy owns 160 acres of land worth on the market $10 an acre, that is, each boy is worth $1600 in place of the $150 with which he came to Canada; and altogether they have, besides their farms, fifty-five head of cattle and some twenty horses,-another $4000 all told. To be sure, they have not yet furnished their house; but you must remember that four years ago the unemployed of England had neither furnishings nor fuel, nor for that matter, as I saw them march the streets of London, could very many of them boast the possession of shirts. Old newspapers tucked under closely buttoned coats did duty for underwear, though the lack of socks inside tattered boots could not be hidden. And while these boys were still in the bare state of the newcomer who will not go in debt, they had a vegetable garden of ten acres that was more absolute security against want than all the free soup kitchens in London.

Face the facts of the case squarely! Four years ago these lads had only $150 each between them and pauperism. To-day they are secure against want. Four years ago they belonged to the class that whines round you in the streets of the old country cities with pusillanimous plea for dole because of women and children whom they ought never to have had. To-day they presented us with vegetables from their garden, for which they refused to take pay. The change represents more than a transition. It is a new birth, a