Notwithstanding the fact that I have repeatedly said I would not answer questions unless they came through THE PRAIRIE FARMER the people who, by ways and means best known to themselves, have managed to obtain my address, keep right on asking questions by mail at a rate that would drive me frantic if anything could.  But nothing ever troubles me long at a time, so I take your disregard of my wishes good naturedly, as I take everything else that I can’t help, and in the future I will answer all questions whether they come through THE PRAIRIE FARMER or not, sometime.  To be sure “sometime” is not very definite, but it is the best I can do.  My poultry letters are “too numerous to mention” and it requires no small amount of time to answer them all; but I won’t growl about that if you will only be patient and not grumble if you don’t get an answer “by return mail,” or “in the next paper.”  All questions of general interest will be answered in these columns as soon as possible, while those that require an immediate answer will be attended to by mail.  Poultry raisers who desire information that I can give, and who have not my address, can address THE PRAIRIE FARMER.  However, let me ask you not to write except when necessary, and then please put your questions as plainly as possible, and “be as brief as the nature of the subject will permit.”

And when you are writing to me don’t use postal cards.  Postal cards are only intended for the briefest of business messages, but lots of people use them for nearly all their correspondence.  I know one man who writes love letters on postal cards.  Most women and some men manage to make one side of a 5 x 3 inch postal card do duty for four pages of commercial note.  They will write up and down and across lots and on the bias until the whole thing is so hopelessly mixed and tangled up that if the mystery of a woman’s ways, or the fate of Charlie Ross were solved upon one of these cards all the “experts” in the world could not unravel it.  A penny saved may be as good as a penny earned, and I have no objections to your saving it in a legitimate way, but when it comes to saving it at the expense of my time, patience, and eye-sight, I object most decidedly.  Hereafter I will not answer postals; I will not even read them.

An Iowa woman writes:  “If it is true that vaccination prevents chicken cholera, how does it happen that fowls which had the genuine chicken cholera last season took the disease again this season and died from the effects of it?  This happened on our place.”  I have puzzled my brains on the same thing but I am not scientific enough to explain things that I don’t know anything about, so I leave that conundrum to be answered by some of the learned people who have the whole theory of chicken cholera at their tongues’ end.

Several correspondents want to know how to get rid of rats in poultry-houses.  One man says that he firmly believes that there are more rats than chickens in his poultry-house, and although he has tried half a dozen different kinds of rat-traps he rarely catches anything in them.