272 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



pay. It will pay to dig out your old-fashioned cur- 

 rants and grow the Red Giant and the White Grape. 

 It will double the crop at least and more than double 

 the market returns. My neighbor has large or- 

 chards, two of them, but neither of them pays, for 

 the plums are covered with knot and the pears are 

 blighted, while the apple trees have not been trimmed 

 for thirty years. Nothing pays in the country but 

 the best, and this grown with intelligence. Indoor 

 waste is fully as disastrous as outdoor waste. Cer- 

 tainly an immense amount of food is tossed into the 

 waste heap or fed to worthless animals, and more 

 is lost from bad storage, as well as careless cooking; 

 every bit of this tells on the problem whether a 

 country home pays. 



Now let us sum up this matter of a complete 

 country home, as I have outlined it and see what it 

 all comes to. I will let the truck farmer speak for 

 himself. " We rented a farm of fifteen acres, one- 

 half of it under cultivation. We paid sixty dollars 

 for a horse and thirty for a cow, buying also a wagon, 

 with necessary tools. This left us with a very small 

 balance in pocket. The first year, our trucking gave 

 us a balance of nine dollars. The next year we 

 added fifty acres more and trucked the whole of it. 

 We added to our stock by borrowing one hundred 

 and fifty dollars; and at the end of this season we 

 had twenty-five chickens, with a litter of pigs, but 

 buying left us in debt one hundred dollars. 



" The next year we sold two hundred and sixty- 



