Ten Thousand a Year 269 



as high as five thousand bushels of cherries, of 

 which about one-third were sweet, the aggregate 

 return being nearly fourteen thousand dollars. Of 

 this nearly four thousand dollars were from the 

 sweet cherries. His prune orchard, the seven 

 acres, in highly productive years, yielded twenty- 

 three hundred dollars; the six acres of peaches 

 — and he managed to maintain the orchard, it 

 appears, some twenty years, for it was of this 

 age at the time of which I am speaking — yielded, in 

 favorable years, as high as thirty-one himdred 

 dollars. But there were less productive years, 

 when the gross return was as low as two-fifths 

 that amount. His garden supplied a heavy sur- 

 plus over the amotmt used by his family. The four 

 acres of berries — at the time of which I speak, red 

 raspberries were producing, en grosse, some seven- 

 teen himdred dollars a year. But there were 

 records of a similar acreage of currants, straw- 

 berries, and, for a few years, of' black raspberries, 

 evidently tried and, in Neville's opinion, found 

 wanting. But most farmers would have considered 

 them highly profitable as Neville managed to 

 make them yield — so far as I could interpret his 

 figures — ^never less than two himdred dollars an 

 acre. 



I went — out of curiosity — pretty carefully into 

 his expense account for all the years of large and 

 small income and discovered that on the average 

 his yearly income from his sixty-three acres was 

 nearly fourteen thousand dollars net. His expenses 



