It may be argued that it is neither very courteous nor very kind to walk into a stranger’s house and ask him to sell you his household goods and chattels. To such argument may be offered the reply that one can hardly judge a farm home by the same rule as one does a city home. The visit of a stranger is regarded with widely different eyes; it is a pleasure, a treat, to most farm-wives to receive such a visit, and the farmer will come plodding home from the distant fields, in order not to lose the chat with the stranger and the pleasant diversion. Who would attempt to enter and to lodge over night in a stranger’s house in the city? A police-station or a lunatic asylum would probably quickly shelter your intruding head. There is hardly a farm-house where such a suggestion would be unwelcome or resented, provided you look not like a bandit or horse-thief. Then, too, farmers and even farm-wives do not generally regard their old furniture and furnishings with quite the same feeling that we do ours. The old blue Staffordshire ware they consider almost worthless, and are often glad to sell it for ready cash; but their lilac-sprigged china, a wedding gift or a purchase with their few hard-earned dollars, they often value and cherish as we do Sèvres. A farmer handles very little money—his wife still less, and ofttimes the money paid by china hunters is a godsend in country homes. Much good is done, much comfort conferred by exchanging money for crockery. Carpers say: “But you do not pay city prices.” Sometimes, alas, we do, fired by our china mania, “the insane root that takes the reason prisoner,” though we never should. The farmer does not pay city rents, he has not the risk and expense of transfer to the city, he pays no salesman. If he could sell all his farm products as easily, profitably, and safely as he sells his china, lucky would he be. Sometimes the discovery that the “old blue pie-plates” are of any value is a delight and a surprise to him, but he sees at once that when they are worth so much he cannot afford to keep them. Hence he is far from being offended at the easy means of sale offered to him.