There are nearly a fourth of a thousand farm papers in the United States, all bent on teaching the farmers how to attend to their own business. Some of these papers are good, many are bad and the others are awful. The good ones may be had for a dollar and the others for the asking. Looking the literary field over, everybody seems to be entitled to something good but the farmer. From the roasts and broils of the intellectual feasts of to-day he will get the leavings, next week, in the shape of a stale hash, served on cheap paper, flanked with guessing contests and patent medicine advertisements and surrounded by the green, green cresses of the same old thing. And yet a large and most respectable majority of the people of these United States are farmers or interested in the soil. Their daily needs include all the things the man in the city needs and much more, for the man in the city does not plow, neither does he reap nor sow. These people of the soil are progressive to the extent of their chances, honest, and seekers of the truth and better ways, lovers of the good in fiction and in fact. They constitute about seventy per cent of our population and commit about two per cent of our crime. Why should not they have a literature? Why should not a magazine laid around the soil, come into their homes, as it comes into the homes of the dwellers in the strenuous city, not to teach them their business but to help to amuse, to interest, to uplift? This is the object of Trotwood’s Monthly. If it does not tell you when to plant your beans and when to eat your potatoes, it hopes to give you a literature that will help you to be satisfied with your diet of potatoes and your burden of beans. For in truth, the editor of Trotwood’s Monthly does not know all about potatoes nor beans nor corn. Indeed, he is willing to admit that any good farmer in all this country who knows his business knows more about it than the editor of Trotwood’s Monthly. For his business in life is literature. He has made it his profession, as the farmer or stockman has made farming and stock-raising his, and he has toiled at it through years in the heat of the noonday sun and often--often--while the world around him slept, by the light of a sleepless lamp. He will not try to tell you, therefore, of the things he knows but little about, neither will he attempt to carry intellectual coals to a new castle of newly mown hay. He will not attempt the impossible and the ridiculous; but if, in looking over his handiwork month after month, you find something to make you forget for awhile the burdens and problems of life; if through his magazine you learn to realize the unseen sweetness and independence of the life of him who claims kindred with the soil; if you are shown nature with truer eye, and learn to love her and all that is hers; if you catch, now and then, a spark of that finer spirit that burns so brightly in true literature, lighting the lamp of ambition in your boy or girl, and