faggots which burned in the middle of the room, the smoke finding its way out through a hole in the roof-thatch. A boiling cauldron was singing its cheerful song.

We had supper of rice which we ate with chop-sticks, of boiled eggs which we ate as best we could out of the shells, and of tea which was delicious. And then, leaving Mr. Ito telling the strange story of our travels to the fireside group, we were led off to our beds which had been spread upon the floor of a rear room.

A NOVEL METHOD OF DESCENT

Promptly at sunrise our peasant friends arrived, the three girls still in the party. The rope was now tied to the rear axle, and the car started over the crest of the mountain, some of the Japs straining to hold it back while others lifted first the front and then the rear wheels around the sharp

turns.

For two miles they accompanied us through the valley; and then-a good road stretching out before us-we bade them good-bye. Fifty yen (twenty-five dollars) was the sum they divided among themselves. The cheerful chorus of "sayonara" and "banzai" that followed us bespoke their delight with this payment.

At noon the road led us through a corner of the big town of Takefu. Here there was a stop of thirty minutes to replenish our

gasoline supply. From among the crowd which quickly gathered, there came an old gentleman of dignified bearing. Perhaps he was the Mayor of Takefu-but anyhow, he was a Local Personage. He spoke to Mr. Ito.

"He says," quoted Mr. Ito, "that this is the first, very likely the last chance of the people of Takefu to see one of these strange machines. He asks if the Honorable Gentleman will be so courteous as to travel through the main street of the town so that all may see.

""

"Sure," said Schuster.

And so a round trip was made through Takefu's main street which was hung with banners, streamers and lanterns innumerable and swarmed with men, women, children and babies. For it was a gala day, the big temple in the heart of the town holding its annual festival.

Out of Takefu, the road led once more up into the mountains. But the highway was now broad and hard; and we leaned back in our seats, smoked cigars, and watched a fifteen-mile panorama of glorious mountain scenery unroll itself.

Then we passed through a long tunnel, and, from the road curving on the brink of a high precipice, we got our first view of the Japan Sea. In a sheltered bend of the surf-marked shore of Wakasha Bay, lay Tsuruga, and at her moorings two hundred yards off shore the S. S. Mongolia, which was to carry us across sea to Vladivostock.

E have gone the round of the year, and the round of the gardens and orchards. You will now be asking: "How can I, being city born and city bred, and hardly knowing a dandelion from a coltsfoot, without any special experience or training, make me a home in the country? Nothing would please me better than to get out of the crowd, and rest in the green fields; dig my own vegetables, pick my own fruit, milk my own cow, and all the rest of it." I am going to answer this question, in one of the most practical articles I have ever written. You are quite right that you do not know anything about how to get to work making a country home; and the probabilities are that you know a great deal less than you suppose you do.

There

is nothing that needs more special culture than home-making anywhere, but especially a home that involves fruit growing and all the fine arts of horticulture. You will have to know more or less about entomology, botany, geology, and most of the other sciences. If you do not you will simply be a blunderer, and a rather feeble member of the Hayseed family. The trouble now is that nine-tenths of those in the country do not know how to make a home, and only live from hand to mouth. They do not know how to utilize what God or Nature offers them.

The country is gaining on the city steadily, but not fast enough; and the reason is just this one of ignorance. The schools are doing all they can to spoil farm boys, giving them all sorts of information except about what constitutes farm life. In this way the best of them are tumbled into the city chaos, and it is hard work to counteract this drift, and locate the tired-out city folk in gardens.

We are gaining, however, and the percentage of the increase of population that faces countryward is double that of 1890. Huge cities are no longer needed. We do not need to concentrate wealth or to use it in the bulk. We have got our huge enterprises that required syndicates and trusts, off our hands; and now the great problem is to secure a more equable distribution of the wealth we have acquired. We must also vastly increase our production in order to feed the enormously growing population; and at least one-half of our non-producers, who now make up what is called the laboring class, and a good many of the capitalists as well, must be got into a position where they can create food for themselves, and add to the big surplus needed for others. These articles of mine have a very positive aim, in the way of helping the stranded out onto the land, with a capacity for self-support, and the power to get hold of the social problem and help support others.

Without exception the most important point for you to consider is that building houses and planting gardens may not create a home. I know a lot of people all around the country, who have built large houses and sold a lot of fruit, without having any conception of home and home life. What you want to get into the country for is to build a home, not to get rich. You cannot do anything else worth the while with riches, if you get them, except to make home more homeful. That is the end of it every time, or else your riches are a humbug and a hurt. Can we not get an ideal of having about enough, a plenty, and then enough over so as not to pinch our generosity? I am quite sure that some of our fathers, those that pioneered out of Massachusetts and Connecticut, had something of this sort in mind, and in practice as well. Their bank accounts

were very small, and they needed not to exceed one hundred dollars of cash each year. This went to pay their taxes, buy books, and a few of those little nick-nacks that peddlers carried about the countryadding doctors bills. We used to make our own furniture, our carpets and clothing, our soap and candles; shod our own horses, made our own shoes, and the home was a little institution by itself, almost self-supporting. Now a well-to-do farmer needs from five hundred to twelve hundred dollars surplus cash for annual outgoes. This does not mean going back in our family economy, but it does mean going through a transition era, in which we have learned to buy our fuel and our clothing and our furniture and nearly everything else. In order to meet these expenses we have to rush our crops, and grow those that are more profitable. Well, wheat has gone up from thirty cents to a dollar, and corn from twenty cents to another dollar; and so we get our extra income.

Now what we want is not to undertake to grow everything that we use and build a home just like our fathers, but it is to react to a position of self-support. We have slipped into a habit of spending, and what is worse, a habit of wanting and craving everything under the sun. Pianos are bought all over our hillsides; twenty of them where they cannot be played, to one that can be used. Education is enormously costly, in institutions that do not fit the pupil to work, but just the contrary, unfitting him or her. The simple life that we hear so much about just now, means that we are getting tired of this uneasy effort to be satisfied with show and rubbish, and we wish to begin once more the art of home building.

I do not wish to get away from this point until you clearly understand me, that is, if you are going into the country, go first of all and all the time to make just as well rounded a home, and live as quiet and simple a home life as possible. The getting rich business may come; and if you are wise in your planning and working, you will surely have something beyond your daily needs; and it is just here that I make my next point, you must not get out of reach of a market. I shall show you pretty soon just how this market demand will come about for a well-conducted

country home. You do not make it a first aim, but when it does come about you must be prepared for it. You are going to become one of the world's producers, and help feed the millions, as well as feed your own family. By and by when the idle millions become producers there will be less of this market need. For the present it will be hardly advisable for you to buy your land at a greater distance from the city than twelve or fifteen miles. If you must live at a greater distance, locate near a railroad or a trolley line. We will suppose your location to be ten miles from a market that will absorb all that you can grow. As soon as you have something to sell begin to hunt up private customers, and keep up this habit all your life. This is the natural relation between producers and consumers. Middlemen of all sorts are necessary only when conditions are abnormal. If you have a stock of berries for market, or plums, or apples, your relations to your customers should be so close that you would not dare to misrepresent your goods, even if your conscience would allow it. Your customer must get the absolutely fresh berries, handled in the best manner, and delivered just when wanted. In return, the profits of your work go to yourself, and your customers, if honestly dealt with, will be willing to pay you top prices. I cannot emphasize this point too much, both for its effect on the producer and on the consumer. Everything that comes from the country home should bring country purity and country conscience, and it should give to the home that takes it a deal of pleasure as well as health. When your market stuff increases, your customers will be proud of saying, "We get all of our strawberries, or all of our butter, from Jones' farm. It is always A No. 1."

Now you are going, without skill, to start a new kind of life. You expect in due time to be a horticulturist. Let me warn you right now, not to take up one or two specialties. Strawberry bankrupts are as common as cotton bankrupts. Two or three bad years in succession will use up all your capital, and dump you back into the city again. There are about ten or twelve different fruits that make up a gardener's rôle, and I advise you to plant moderately of each.

The result will be that you will have a small income from each one, and all these small things put together will give you a respectable balance for the year. Let the list run something like this: strawberries, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, plums, grapes, pears, apples; and to these add honey, and the sale of surplus plants. Here are twelve items for income. You will find as a rule that about two of these will fail each year; not the same two, but some one or two or three will not respond with a crop. It will be just so if you are living farther south, where you take peaches, or still farther south where you take in oranges or pineapples. You must reckon on a failure of about onefifth, possibly one-fourth of your sale articles. It will almost always come about, however, that the rest will give you something extra, and you will have an average annual return.

You will be of course in a hurry to begin to get a return from your gardens and orchard, not only for market but for your own use; and you will want to know which of the fruits will most promptly give you a supply. There is one of the berries that stands uniquely outside our other crops, so much so that it can command the local market every time. You cannot ship raspberries more than a few miles without ruining them. The result is that a raspberry crop is in demand at home, and outsiders cannot get in to steal your customers. This is not true of the strawberry, or the blackberry, or the plum or the cherry, and it is only moderately true of the currant. The raspberry is a prolific bearer and the bushes will yield crops the second year from planting. The first year it must make canes and the second year give fruit.

The strawberry is just as quick to give a home supply, because a bed made in August will yield a crop the next May or June; but remember that the North Carolina and the Virginia and the New Jersey berries can all come into market before yours if farther north, and you must take what prices are established. The strawberry remains, then, a capital source for home food, and if you have just the right soil, with plenty of irrigation, it is all right for a market crop. Not having the best soil for strawberries, myself, I grow them mainly for the purpose of test and com

parison. One may get a great deal of pleasure where he can get very little profit, so it happens that my thirty or forty varieties really brighten up my country work, keeping me apace with the world's progress in that line of fruit. I like to know that Wm. Belt is the best strawberry yet, just as other fellows have their pet race horses. And when I eat strawberries I like to walk up and down the rows and taste them by comparison. Then I dig out the poorer sorts, leaving spaces in which to plant new candidates.

Right after the raspberry and strawberry, you want a small orchard or garden of cherries and plums. The cherries ripen with the strawberries, and there is always a first rate market demand for every bushel we can grow. The plum market on the contrary is likely to be glutted. Your best way, however, is to have a good supply of the very choicest sorts, like Green Gage, and Magnum Bonum, and Bevay, and Grand Duke, and these will always find buyers. The blackberry crop comes in just after the raspberries, and with the early plums, as well as the latest cherries. It is a good crop to grow in moderate supply. I have worked up my market until I can readily dispose of a hundred bushels each year. This brings us down to the pears, which tally with the middle and late plums, and the early apples. Every horticulturist wants a small orchard of pears, because there are half a dozen varieties of this fruit that are about as near perfection as anything that has been evolved in the orchard. The Seckel pear is one of the ideals, but the Seckel is no better than the Sheldon, the Bosc, and the Dana's Hovey.

All this while one of the very nicest crops for a little country home is dovetailing with the other things I have named, and is doing more than its share to give you a good income. The little old currant bush came out of Connecticut with our pioneer fathers, and with them marched across the continent. It did not do much more than make sauce and pies for our mothers, until the Versailles and Fay were created, or happened; but then came a wonderful growth of the currant as a market fruit. If I were to name the one crop that, next to the red raspberry, I advise you to plant freely, it would be the

currant. Select the White Grape for white, and Giant Red with some of the London Market, or possibly Versailles. The charm of this fruit is that you do not have to hurry in picking and marketing. You can sit down on stools by the bushes (and the bushes are all the better if under trees, for they like shade), and you can pick while you gossip with your friends. It is a delicious fruit from every standpoint, and it holds the market remarkably well. The demand is always increasing for prime currants. The red raspberry has gone up from ten cents to twenty, and the currant has gone up from seven to twelve-that is to private customers. If you sell in open market the price will vary every day.

Next to the apple crop in all around value I place the grape. This crop begins to ripen, in the middle North, somewhere about the middle of August, but your Concords are not in good condition before the middle of September. I grow over one hundred varieties of grapes; over half of these are seedlings, and among the seedlings are some superb new sorts, well worthy of general distribution. I sell very few, but consider the grape as specifically a food for home. No other fruit can surpass it for all around purposes. One may almost live on the grape alone, which cannot be said of any other fruit. It can be called the vegetable beefsteak. I should consider it quite possible for a good sized family to use half a ton in a year. Let us see; if we get the Lady grape ripe August 20th, to be followed by Eldorado and the Hayes and the Worden; these followed later by the Herbert and the Lindley and the Gaertner; these still later by the Catawba and the Agawam, the Concord coming in as it may, you will have a succession of grapes reaching down through the months of September, October, November, and lasting well through December and January. With no other precaution than storing them in baskets in a cool room, not a cellar, you may have them until the middle or last of January. In a proper storage room they can be kept of course much later. Here you have a delicious and strengthening food running through five or six months.

A chief point to be considered is that you can grow grapes anywhere and every

where. You can grow hundreds of pounds on your barn; hundreds more on your house. If you have an old arbor that looks bad, cover it with a grapevine. Cover old trees that have got a few more years of life, and need foliage. For verandas and porches no vine is either prettier, or sweeter in blossom, or finer for fruit than the grape. Of course a grape arbor is a delightful place to sit when the clusters hang down invitingly, or when the blossoms fill the air with perfume. So I say grow grapes, grow lots of them, eat lots of them, and save your meat bills.

Now I have told you pretty nearly the story of the surplus. The pears begin to bear about the third year after planting, provided you have headed the trees low down-that is, let them have their limbs near the ground. If you have trimmed them high you will not get fruit of any account under five or six years. Apples trimmed in the same way begin to bear very early, but if trimmed high will give no appreciable crop under six or seven years—some varieties not under ten years. But you see all this while you have been selling your small fruits, beginning with your berries, then your cherries, then your plums, and now you are selling pears and apples. The big trees are planted in the same ground with your berries, and as they get large, and want all the ground and all the feed to themselves, you can plow out your berries and rely upon the larger fruits alone. I would advise you to continue growing currants under your apple trees, but to start a new raspberry garden in the open. After this you will have much the larger income from your apples, provided you handle them wisely, and have a home cider mill to turn the waste into cider and vinegar.

I should figure something like this, after I had had my country home for ten years; strawberries home supply only; blackraspberries only for home, with a possible small surplus; red raspberries, $300 a year; cherries, $100 a year; gooseberries, $25 a year; blackberries, $250 a year; plums, $100 a year; apples and pears, $800 a year. All this depends of course on decision of character, as well as on comprehending the work you are at.

There is another branch of horticulture that lays its emphasis on flowers, and if a