236 Eight Dollars an Acre. 



acres. It ripens ver}' early, retains its color after being picked, and is of 

 undisputed flavor. If not bearing so profusely as the Lawton, its earliness 

 brings up the difference in the cash result. Two acres in this fruit will 

 require less looking after than one of strawberries. But the grower of one 

 berry should have all three. As they ripen in succession, not interfering 

 with each other, a continuance of cash receipts is secured until peaches 

 and grapes come in. The same boxes answer for the three crops. If one 

 of them should be shortened by rain or drought, the others will be pretty 

 sure to escape. Thus, our eggs being in different baskets, we can afford 

 a smash-up in one of them without a ruinous result. 



Here are, say, seven acres devoted to asparagus and the berries, planted 

 and cultivated as a specialty. There will be no really hard work in prop- 

 erly attending to them. It is care, attention, with brains^ that are required, 

 — more head-work than hand-work. IIovv astonishing the contrast between 

 the product of such a field and that of the Vermont farmer, who toiled 

 over a tract of a hundred and twenty-five acres to secure a return of only 

 seven hundred and thirty-two dollars ! How little that w^orthy and con- 

 tented man can know how other people live ! Eight dollars an acre ! Yet 

 I should be unwilling to disturb the perfect satisfaction which this modest 

 return appears to have brought with it. His happy temper shows us that 

 contentment does not consist in the number of dollars that one annually 

 gains, and that money is far from being every thing in this world. True 

 comfort lies in a nutshell. 



" The birds singing gayly, that come at my call, — 

 Give me these, with sweet peace of mind dearer than all." 



But, changing off for a moment from fruit to truck, let me give some items 

 from the note-book of a small trucker. He marketed a hundred dollars' 

 worth of tomatoes from one-third of an acre ; from a quarter acre of cante- 

 lopes, fifty dollars ; from another quarter acre in early cabbages, fifty dol- 

 lars ; from two and a quarter acres in turnips and tomatoes, four hundred 

 and eighty-eight dollars and fifty cents ; and from the fortieth of an acre 

 of onions and peppers, twenty-five dollars ; making a total of seven hundred 

 and eleven dollars and fifty cents from less than four acres of extremely 

 light land, or within a trifle of the gain upon thirty times the same number of 

 acres devoted to grass and grain in Vermont. True, the Vermont farmer 



