AND WHERE TO FIND ONE. 201 



all around, with only here and there a house upon a plain 

 miles in extent. Now, getting beyond these we come to 

 fields of most wonderfully rich and rank green Indian corn, 

 great hay -fields, and smaller ones of rye and wheat stubble, 

 with here and there men digging potatoes. There are but 

 few market gardens or fruit farms, though every one has 

 apple and pear trees for his own use. As a general thing, 

 going on towards Jamaica, farming appears to be done now 

 much as it was in the days of the fathers and grandfathers 

 of the present occupants. Here is an exception. Captain 

 Briggs, who for thirty years followed the sea, and has since 

 been engaged in commerce, and even now, at sixty-five 

 years old, goes every day to the city to attend to business, 

 has still found time to plant an orchard covering twenty- 

 five acres, in which he has sixteen hundred pear-trees, now 

 six to eight years old, and very thrifty, and all in bearing 

 condition. A good many are in fruit this year, although it 

 is a season of general failure, and all show a vigor of 

 growth that proves this fact, that although a man may be 

 bred upon the sea, or has been fifty years of his life en 

 gaged in commercial pursuits, it does not disqualify him 

 from cultivating the earth with success if he is a man of 

 sense, who never does a thing without knowing why it 

 should be done. 



&quot; For instance, he thought when about to plant his apple- 

 trees, that they were strong-rooted trees, with heavy tops, 

 and should be planted on the northeast side of the orchard 

 to break the prevailing winds from the slower-growing and 

 weaker pear-trees. In looking about, however, he found 

 that apple-trees, as they are usually planted out, are of slow 

 growth, sometimes dying, and sometimes being blown over 

 by the winds that sweep up this gently inclined plain from 

 the broad Atlantic. So he inquired, why ? He soon found 

 why. He saw trees stuck down into holes that were so 



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