538 [ASSEMBLT 



melons, will be cultivated by the acre instead of by the bed or 

 the patch, and flowers, too, will have their place ; and then while 

 the men are doing the hard work, the women and the children can 

 be advantageously employed in tending and gathering the flowers 

 and the fruits. The character of the soil — light, warm, and easily 

 tilled — is exceedingly favorable to such use of it. And with fair 

 play to that soil in restoring generously to it, by appropriate ma- 

 nure, the elements which it parts with in every crop, the return 

 will be sure, and with a ready market and cheap and rapid trans- 

 portation, cannot disappoint reasonable expectation. This charac- 

 ter of the soil i>i Queens county, its general salubrity and its pure 

 water, combined with its proximity to the great city, invite to a 

 residence here. And as there is no desire more universal than 

 that with which men advancing in years, and who have passed 

 ihi-ir days of manhood and maturity in the whirl and tumult of 

 business, long f(*r the quiet, the independence, the repose, and 

 the memories of country life — so it may be set down as one of 

 the permanent elements in the value of Queens county lands, 

 that they are the coveted retiri sg and resting places of many a 

 citizen who looks forward eventually to spend tlie serene evening 

 of his days beneath his own vine and his own fig tree, and last to 



kDOW 



the life 



Led by primeval ages, uncorrupt. 



When angels dwelt, and God himself, with man. 



" It is this natural taste," says Lamartine, the poet, philoso- 

 pher and statesman, whom France, in her spasmodic wrestlings 

 after freedom, proved herself incapable of appret-iating ; " it is 

 this natural taste, this sacred relationship between man and a lit- 

 tle plot of ground, more particulatly appropriated, fenced in, cui 

 tivated, planted, sown, watered and harvested by the hand of the 

 gardener, wliich iji all time has made the story of the garden a 

 part of fhe story of the nation, and also given it a place in the 

 reverise as to future life, or the theogony of peoples. 



^•Examine all theogonies, ail religions, all history, even all fa- 

 ble, and not one amoi'g ihem all that di es nor iissign man in his 

 origin to an Eden ; that is, a gaiden j there is not one that, after 

 death, does not conduct him to an Elysium ; not one that does not 



