378 MISSOUKI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



1 



Southern Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico take the surplus 

 at good prices. One firm shipped this season to Texas alone 10,000 

 barrels of apples. All the tame grasses grow luxuriantly. Blue grass 

 is indigenous, and grows every place it has a chance and will do as 

 well as in the far-famed blue grass regions of Kentucky. Stock rais- 

 ins: is carried on to a great extent. But little feed is required in the 

 winter. The climate of Southwest Missouri is about the same as 

 Western Virginia. Rain falls regularly. 



The New York Times says that if the owner of a 100 acre farm' 

 worth ^20,000, were to sell his property for cash he could not possibly 

 invest his money nearly so well as it was in the farm, for the interest 

 at five per cent, on the capital would not begin to provide him with 

 house, provisions, comforts and luxuries which he enjoyed on the farm^ 

 but never took any account of in his book keeping. 



COUNTRY LIFE. 



The subtle charm of living in the country may be summed up in, 

 a word or two. It is the revival in our " embers" of something " that 

 nature still remembers," of a wild, open-air, primitive existence when 

 man was on a footing, both as friend and foe, with the animal tribes, 

 and rooted like the plants in his mother earth. We are twin births., 

 everyone of us. A red and hirsute Esau contends with the smooth 

 Jacob of civilization. He is sure to get worsted in the end ; but he is 

 not dead, and will ever and anon muster his Bedouin forces for an on- 

 slaught upon the household gods and the sleek prosperity of his rival. 

 Evolution at times has to give away to revolution. ^Hence the town i& 

 ever overflowing its dykes, and spreading itself over the fields. The 

 child's vacation at grandfather's farm, the weary clerk's week or fort- 

 night out of the store or office, the emptying of all the brown stone 

 fronts in summer, the tribulations of " country board," the concourse 

 around a bit of grass or a spouting founting in a city square, even the 

 rowdy excur.-ion on a Sunday steamboat, are all forays of the gentle of 

 ungentle savage within us in search of the hunting grounds of a dimly 

 remembered past. We are always coasting along a primal continent 

 of Palms and painted Indians, whose wafted odors we faintly catch and 

 whose drifted blossoms cross our path till ;the crew, unmindful of 

 worldly wise old Ulysses, are crazy to go ashore. 



And so we go into the country. And if we be truly inspired with 

 the "primal sympathy," we shall find in every sight and sound and 

 smell a soothing and a suggestion, which meet a deeper need than that 



