242 An American Fruit-Farm 



fruit-farm is evidence on the spot, and he cannot 

 prove an alibi and also claim title to the fruit-farm. 

 He may say what he pleases; his farm speaks for 

 itself is his indisputable confession. We come to 

 the man at last. 



And he makes the farm: soil, orchard, vineyard, 

 and the rest. He selects the varieties ; trims, tends, 

 harvests, markets. When he counts gain or loss he 

 merely takes an invoice of himself. He may charge 

 losses to the weather or to the wickedness of man, or 

 to the hunger of fungus or insect; he may credit 

 gain to the weather, or to the wishes of man and 

 cultivation; but somehow, as the years pass, it is 

 he himself who divides the account between loss 

 and gain. If he is the gainer there is gain; if the 

 loser, there is loss. Fruit-farming in all valleys 

 is a human invention. Nature cares no more for 

 filberts than for Canada thistles; man prefers 

 the filberts and roots out the thistles in order to 

 grow filberts. He invents filberts. He would 

 invent Canada thistles on provocation. 



The man who produces ten thousand a year 

 from fifty acres has a secret which he may not be 

 able to impart. Usually it dies with him. His 

 successor, on the same acreage, makes a bee line for 

 bankruptcy. He understood how to do this, but 

 not to raise ten thousand a year. Nor can he be 

 told, or instructed; he is not the man for the job. 

 There is no more familiar sight in the Valley than 

 of a fruit-farm which was. ' ' While Jones was alive, 

 you should have seen that farm; it isn't the same 



