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The Seaforth News, 1949-08-25, Page 3Enmeshed—This ship loots as if it's caught in a gigantic spider web — and that's not far from the truth. The ship is a brass scale model miniature "long hull" destroyer,' whose: topside structures are precisely Scaled counterparts of those on full- sized naval vessels. The "web" in which it is apparently caught is a mesh of hardware cloth, mounted on a turntable: The set-up - is used in investigating radiation characteristics of shipboard radio antennas. The hardware cloth simulates the conductivity of the ocean at regular communication frequencies He -Man's Code By Richard Bill Wllklnson Andy had sensitive eyes and deli- cate hands, but Leonie, born and bred a westerner of pioneer stock, was human, She loved him, It wasn't until after they were mar- ried that she discovered he }vas a physical coward. She found out the night of Serena Boone's engagement party. Tony Swiftwas there. As usual, he was drunk. He was a handsome devil, this. Tony, tall and .bronzed and reckless. He had been Leonie childhood sweetheart. Folks said she would have married Ttim if it were not for his drinking. "If I ever see your gly _ face - around here again, I'l1 kill youl" The first thing Tony saw, when he came. through the door was Le onie and Andy dancing together. A scowl crossed his face. Then he laughed. When they whirled past him, die stepped up and whacked Andy on the back, 'Tony's cut," he grinned, "make way for a man." Leonie flushed. Andy hesitated, looked at Tony, then gave way smiling. "Sure thing," he said, "your dance, Tony." As soon as she could, without ap- pearing too obvious, ---she asked Andy to take her home. There she accused; "Why did you let hila insult you? Oh, the shame of it!" Andy was startled and bewilder- ed. ''Let who insult ate, honey?" "Who?" She stared at -him. "Tony Swift, of course! I was never so humiliated it my life." "Tony? Oh, you mean because of what he said? Shucks, honey, Tony didn't meat- anything. He was drunk. " The appalling truth flashed across Leonie's brain in that moment. And was a coward! He'd been afraid of Tony, which was why he evaded the issue! With a little whimpering cry, she turned and ran sobbing from the room. A week later, on Saturday night, Andy stopped by at Seth Lancey's store to see Seth on a matter of business, A Couple of :boys from his mine were there, drinking al the bar. Minutes later, talking with Seth, he heard a ruinous out front, Investigating, he discovered that two boys were engaged in a lii•awl with three men from tt"i.e Dar \ cattle ranch. Andy stood by an, watched a while. Others joined in. It began to look as though the place would be wrecked. Andy got out of there. . Leonie heard about it the next day. That settled things for her. Andy was bewildered and unhap- py. The next day he found himself brooding over the situation. By mid-afternoon, he could stand it no longer. Leaving Noah Tait in charge of operations, he drove home. As he strode up the walk he heard a cry. He burst open the. door and found Tony Swift "'trying to kiss his wife. Tony wasn't drunk. He was babbling something about Leonie really loving him. Tony whirled at the sound Andy made. His lip curled. "Oho! The sissy from Bos---" Andy strode across the floor. His face was black. "I guess," he said bitterly, "you're ' dumb, after all. You need` -teaching." He struck out. ,Tony tried to dodge, but Andy's fist clipped him on the chin so hard that' he went down. "Damn youl" He lunged, but Andy wasn't where he expected. Andy's fist flashed out again, and again Tony went down, Andy jerked him to his feet and hit him again. He hit him a third time and a fourth. Blood covered Tony's face. Tony whimpered for mercy. - Andy dragged him to the door and threw hint out. "Andy!" Leonie fled' into his arms. "Oh, my darling, you were wonderful! Oh, precious, forgive me for what 1 said. Andy, why didn't you do that before that night at the dance?" Andy frowned. "Why, shucks, homey, I don't like to fight. Don't you see? He was drunk then. There was no need." Leonie laid her head ori his shoul- der. "I see, darling. Of course see." But she didn't. THFJAIN FRONT J�ku A friend of mine who lives south of the border has sent me an article, written byanIowa poultry expert, which deals with the important question of which is the better plan —to buy your chicken feed all ready mixed, or to do your own mixing, As 1 believe a lot of readers of this column will be interested, I'm passing it along to you "without prejudice," as the. lawyers put it. That is to say, the views expressed are not, necessarily, those that I happen to hold. So here goes. * * Smell 1 buy my nixed poultry feed iu the bag, or would it be bet- tor to mix my. own? The answer to this question de- pends upon the circumstances. But if you're an average flock owner, there's little reason why you should mise yourown mashor concentrate. today. There's -a difference between now and several years .,go, when mix- tures were less complex. Then, some of the ingredients were not used in such small quantities is they are now. They make mixing difficult, * * * In general, flock owners -should buy chick starters in the bag unless they have large quantities of skim milk. The amount of each nutrient required is exact, and there's a risk of not getting them mixed properly. * *. * Not being able to get the right in- gredients is another thing that points to the wisdom of buying baby chick feed in the bag. * * * Flock owners who have devel- oped large poultry projects are the exception in feed nixing. Large- scale broiler plant owners. may be justified in putting in a mixer, buy- ing in. quantity and mixing their own feeds. ' * * * But even big operators have found that there are more ,and bigger problems than they had expected. Most of them now depend upon re- liable feed -mixing companies for all of their supplies for growing birds. * * * It should be further pointed out that a good chick ration, up to the salable age of the coekerels (about 12 weeks) is rich in minerals, vita- mins and protein feeds the farmer does not have in dependable supply. Too, .the chicks can be fed most conveniently by grinding and mix- ing all their feeds together. Wanted Company He got out of bed at 2 a.m., threw a dressing -gown over his py- jamas, and galloped down two flights of stairs to the landlord's flat. He rapped sharply. No answer. He knocked again, and again, Fin- ally the door opened. A sleepy-eyed landlord stuck his head out. "Well," he demanded, "what do jou want?" The other took a deep breath, "I just want to inform you," he said, "that I won't be able to pay the rent this month," "Is that why you woke me in the middle of the night? Couldn't you tell me that in the morning?" The other nodded. "Certainly," he admitted. "But why should I worry alone?" Small Cog In Big Machine=—Stephen Sivy is dwarfed amid the huge gears of this vertical Iayer machine in a cable plant, but he's the guy who makes it go. The 10 -ton' machine is braiding 20 milesofwire rope for elevators in the UN Secretariat Build, ing, Tlie elevators wili transport an estihiated 40,000 perscns daily in the,39-story structure. The small amount of farm -grown feeds contained in the chick ration doesn't justify all the detail work of mixing, balancing' and studying the :cheapest or ,best combinations for producing the chick mash The laying ration presents an- other problem, although, the princi- ple is the same. Instead of the hens requiring a high -protein ration, as do chicks or turkey, poults, they need a protien level of about 15' to 15% per cent pritein. ` Also in con- trast with the chicks, the hens can eat larg quantities of whole grain. Since farriers usually have their own grains, it is most practical to feed a high -protein concentrate (about 26 per cent). Together, they will give you about rhe 15 per cent protein rationyour hens need. * * d: So the farm flock owner needs only to buy a .properly balanced ready mix of protein, mineral and vitamins to use his grains economic- ally. Experience with flock owners who mi, their ' own chick mash or concentrate feeds from reliable formulas leads to the opinion that, too often, they try to change them. * * * They make substitutions, leave out certain feeds that are not,avail- able, or continue to use formulas long after better ones have been dis- covered through controlled experi- ments, * * *- All this doesn't mean that Rock owners should not kncav the secrets of nutrition in poultry feeding.On the contrary, they ought to be able to interpret the faults of nialnutri- tion in . abnormal birds * * * They should take keener interest in knowing when •to start grain feeding, or when to change to a concentrated growing feed from the baby chick mash. * * * But the. poultryman is like the farmer who wisely has turned over the building of ii: machinery to skilled manufacturers. He can be compared to his wife, who has wisely given the task o: making her husband's overalls to the quantity expert in clothing. Not So Easy Aa It Looks Believe me, most beginning auth- ors have had to write their books in the time left over from an eight- hour job. Robert Frost, the poet, worked as a mill hand, as a farmer, and a school teacher; Walter de la Mare held a job as a bookkeeper for nearly eighteen years; Ring Lard- ner reported over fourteen hundred baseball games before he ever had time to write the short stories that made him famous; Thomas Mann sold fire insurance before'his books won the Nobel Prize; Sinclair Lewis typed out his first two novels by night after spending his day as a publicity man for a New York publisher. An editor sees this fight going on at close quarters and, naturally, he wants to see his writers make enough from their books so that they will not have to rent themselves out to Hollywood or spend their entire year writing short stories for the pulp magazines, —From ""The Care and Feeding of Authors," by Edward Weeks. Pets Once But Pests Later Have you heard about the happy little hamster? Sonne enthusiasts call him a toy bear and sit him in a teacup. Easier to tame than white mice, smaller than a guinea pig, clean and -intelligent, with soft, cuddly' brown fur and a host of comical tricks,the craze for ham- sters is'sweeping the country, writes Mark Priestley in Tit -Bits, Pet shops are selling them -profit- ably at 10s. 6d. each. In the United States millions of hamsters are be- ing sold every year. There are hamster clubs and hamster shows. Ili this country American airmen stationed' in Lancashire began breed- ing them as a sideline — and now Warrington youngsters are discov- ering that a coupleof hamsters can produce a fancily of 10 or 12 within 16 days — the shortest period of any manurial known.' Seven weeks after birth the new generation begin look- ing for mates and breed with the sante..amazing prodigality These are the golden facts of the hamster trade. In hard cash a guinea pair produce at least five guineas' worth of progeny in about a fortnight. - Beginning with two females and a male,- one pet' shop has sold nearly 2,000 of their off- spring within six months. Dangerous Craze Some people carry their new pets around in their pockets and even in handbags. Folk living in flats and furnished rooms keep 'thein for company. Superficially they make ideal children's pets, of course. They can be kept in a wooden box a foot square and it doesn't seem to matter very much if now and then a pair escape. Yet there's a grimly serious side tot this craze that Wasn't been pub- licized. In his native habitat, in cer- tain districts of Germany and around the shores of the Mediterra- nean, the hamster is regarded as an agricultural pest as serious as the rabbit or the rat As a pet, he eats up household scraps and anything he is given. At his natural self, he eats roots, grains and fruits. He clambers up apple trees and gnaws at the crops. He burrows into gran- aries, scampers up wheat stalks, He once caused a famine in Syria, lay- ing waste thousands of acres. As a fugitive from a pet shop, he'll nibble into our food stores, fill his pouch with garden lettuce, . . , The potential similarity to the great Australian rabbit plague springs readily to mind, though so far it doesn't seem to have occurred to experts of the ministry of ag- riculture. Less than 165 years ago there were no rabbits whatsoever in the whole of Australia. It was in 1788 that a settler introduced three pairs and let therm loose for sport. Today Australia's rabbit population is -estimated at not less than 80,000,000,000, It would be larger still but for constant trapping, gassing, shooting and an annual prevention expendi- ture of $200,000,000. Lesson of the Rabbits Where the stoney goes was demonstrated in the building of the great 1,139 -mite rabbit fence to keep the rodents out pf Western Australia. Even before it was fin- ished the rabbits broke through, leaping, jumping on each other's backs, prying open every weak spot. A second fence had to be built 75 utiles west of the original one. Later a third fence was started, riding on special girders at railway crossings, 4'/ feet high with barbed wire above the fine netting. Still the rabbits break through. In the arid zones north of Adelaide they gobble, young wattles and shrubs as fast as they shoot from the earth. There is a grave risk that they may help to spread the erosive perils of the central Austra- lian deserts. In an attempt to keep them down, foxes were introduced, but in vain, The foxes crossed with native wild dogs, then fed on subcu- lent young lambs and ignored the rabbits, Gigantic Food Bill Since a liainster eats 100 lb. of food per year, ' and the indications . are that a hamster couple escaping in England today may head an army of pests 25,000,000 strong .. before the year 1952, such an army might ravage our food stocks ,by an annual million tons. These possi- bilities are by no meads fantastic.', Strange though it seems today, the house mouse was once ,considered, a pleasant companion rather than a pest. Last year -- on the showing . of official figures of the ministry' of agriculture — rats and mice' cost us two million ton of food, the equivalent of three months' rations. The hamster carries another men- ace, too. It catches and carries human diseases so readily that the animals are being used today for laboratory research in tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia, infantile paralysis and sleeping sickness. This e< modest asistance to humanity might be argued in their favor. In ,much the same way the grey squirrel was introduced into England just 60 :years ago as mankind's furry little friend, to keep down the depreda- tions of bird life. It still eats the eggs of the starling and hedge sparrow, but also tackles the eggs of partridges and pheasants and dozens of small useful birds, besides destroying the buds and shoots of fruit trees, stripping bark, eating corn and roots, and hunting the less harmful red squirrel almost out of existence. Today anti -squirrel clubs carry out systematic squirrel hunts. The Great Invasion Perhaps the most remarkable example to illustrate the hamster threat lies in the sharply etched case of the musk rat or nutria. Fifty years ago there were none of these rodents in Europe. Today there are believed to be 300,000,000. The great invasion began in 1905 when a Prague nobleman imported five for his estate, intending to take up fur farming as a hobby" Within a few weeks their progeny had swum down the Danube and scoured its tributaries to begin overrunning the frontiers of Germany, Switzer- land and Yugoslavia. Not only attacking barns and granaries, the pests are seen at their worst at a river verge. In a single night a pair can bore 80 feet of tunnelling, always beneath the waterline, to found a home. A. few weeks later their fam- ily in turn start tunnelling galleries. Whole embankments are under- mined, As they collapse, vast river- side areas are flooded and farms inundated. Neither dykes nor rail- way lines, rivers nor canals are safe. Fortunately, musk rats cannot swim the Channel. For years we reckoned ourselves safe from the scourge. The ministry of agricul- ture was warned not to permit im- portation of the pests, but business interests prevailed. A few pairs were imported in order to establish a fur -farming industry. In 1927 two escaped from a nutria or mus- quash farm five miles from Shrews- bury. Threat to Water Supply Soon an area of 350 square miles was infested. Reservoirs were threatened with active pollution. One musk rat forced its way up a reservoir pipe for 800 yards before it finally jammed and died, contami- nating thousands of gallons of water. Fortunately the government was alive to the danger, Special laws for the control of the animals were rushed through Parliament, Scores of professional trappers were trained. For four years thousands of pounds were expended in an intensive nation-wide campaign. When cap• tures at last ceased and careful search failed to show any trace of the creatures, we knew that the drive had brought us victory, e Vii,...,?] 4sia ra st e,w. :> <: <s'ta :"zli4 , Things Are Not As Tough As They Used To Be—After a 10 -day crossing of the North Sea, a band of 53 Danes sailed against mighty Britain to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of their forefathers' invasion of England. But times have changed As these modern Saxons. rowed''their way to shore at Ramsgate in their dragon-prowed Vikingicraft, they were greeted, by thousands of flag-waving Britishers on hand to welcome them. e