324 A Lament for the Season. 



croakers are at fault. But the depression among horticulturists, though 

 not amounting to panic, has been a very severe one. 



Yet every general calamity has its compensations. The woods and 

 swamps of Burlington County, and of the counties adjoining, have yielded 

 up their usual abundance of wild berries to the poor pickers who live in 

 the rough shanties of those desolate regions. There the whortleberry and 

 the blackberry grow in wild luxuriance, inconceivable to those who have 

 never threaded their way through the tangled network of vines and bushes 

 where they are to be found. Years ago, and no doubt even yet, vast quan- 

 tities of these fruits perished where they grew, or became the food of birds, 

 because there was no avenue through which they could be taken to market. 

 But recent railroads have opened up thousands of solitary acres to the New- 

 York and Philadelphia markets. On the line of these roads, hundreds of 

 small farms have been laid out, settlers have come in from abroad, stores 

 have been established ; and the storekeeper, having daily intercourse with 

 the great cities, finds an outlet for whatever quantity of these wild fruits 

 the industrious pickers may be able to collect. They neither plough nor 

 harrow the ground ; nor do they, in many localities, even know who owns 

 it. They toil not, nor do they spin ; for Nature is their spontaneous culti- 

 vator, and ripens for them the profuse harvest with gratuitous regularit}\ 

 All they gather is clear gain. The storekeeper takes it all, no matter how 

 great the quantity. He has measured the capacity of that huge congrega- 

 tion of human stomachs which make up the cities of New York and Phila- 

 delphia, and knows that the glutting of such gastronomic machines is sim- 

 ply an impossibility. So long as there is fruit, so long do they consume. 



This present year, the whortleberry-crop has exceeded all its predecessors. 

 Our adjoining county of Ocean has sent nearly twenty thousand bushels 

 to market ; thus distributing nearly seventy thousand dollars among the 

 very poorest class of dwellers in the pines. It is like a shower of gold 

 descending among them, making poor women and poor children compara- 

 tively rich. This trade, moreover, is annually increasing as facilities for 

 reaching market are multiplied. Next will come the cranberry -crop. To 

 this also the poor whites and blacks of our pine-forests are equally legiti- 

 mate heirs. The cranberry- swamps may have owners, but many are 

 wholly neglectful of them ; and the fruit would perish on the vines, were it 



