24 THREE ACRES AND LIBERTY 



His offer was accepted. In a few days the stones and bricks 

 had been thrown into the holes and covered with dirt. The 

 low places had been filled in. It was a work in which the 

 whole family joined. A small house was rented in the im- 

 mediate neighborhood in lieu of their one room near the 

 foul alleys of the city slum. 



Every inch of the soil was utilized. A rosy hue took the 

 place of the pale, wan cheek of a few months before. And 

 now the harvest has come, and the winter's store can be 

 enumerated. Thirty bushels of potatoes, four bushels of 

 turnips, one bushel of carrots, thirty gallons of sauerkraut, 

 fifteen gallons of catsup, five gallons of pickled beans, one 

 hundred quarts of canned tomatoes, fifty quarts of canned 

 corn, twenty quarts of beans, one thousand or more fine 

 celery stalks, and many other things. Warm clothing has 

 replaced the badly worn garments of nine months ago. A 

 few pieces of furniture have been added. The boy has been 

 provided with a small capital for his little business. ("Va- 

 cant Lot Cultivation," Reprint from N. Y. Charities Review.} 

 Better labor would of course get even better results. 



The personal benefits that have come to a few individual 

 cases, are largely the same that all the gardeners enjoyed in 

 New York and elsewhere. 



An old colored woman a grandmother who had just 

 been released from one of the hospitals where she had been 

 treated for a long time for pleurisy, asked for a garden. It 

 was more than a mile to the nearest plot, but she was quite 

 willing to go even that distance if she could get a garden. 

 At first, owing to her weakened condition, she was forced to 

 work slowly and for short periods only, but a little assistance 

 enabled her to get a garden started. The work proceeded 

 so well that more land was added to her small holding, and 



