Let me offer you one or two illustrations. A friend of mine 

 in Fitchburg has two or three acres of Concord grapes. He 

 raises poultry, too, and he had forty-six hundred eggs from an 

 average of twenty-six hens, from the first of January of last 

 year to the last of December ; but grapes and small fruits are 

 his special hobby. Year before last, from less than an acre 

 then in bearing which he tended himself, he sold very nearly 

 eighteen hundred dollars' worth of grapes. But if he had 

 frittered away his time on forty different crops, and now and 

 then run into town with a dozen of eggs, or a peck of turnips, 

 or a bushel of pease, or a few ears of green corn, or a string of 

 onions, or a box of butter, or a few other little lots of garden 

 truck, do you suppose he would have realized seventeen or 

 eighteen hundred dollars from less than an acre of vineyard ? 

 It is only a few months since I visited that vineyard in com- 

 pany with two or three gentlemen, and on leaving, one of them 

 remarked, " There, I 'd rather own that two acres of vineyard, 

 than the be§t farm in Worcester County." And he was right. 

 Why ? Because with less cost of machinery and management, 

 less wear and tear, it would pay a far larger percentage ot 

 income than the best farm in Worcester County, and hence as 

 an investment, as a- matter of dollars and cents, it was more 

 desirable. 



Again, I know a man in the Connecticut Valley who bought 

 his place, built a large tobacco shed and made some other 

 improvements, and paid for the whole by the single crop of 

 tobacco of the first year. But he gave his mind and attention 

 to it, and didn't try to cultivate much corn or many potatoes. 

 And again, I have a friend in Duxbury who began to reclaim 

 one of the hardest looking bush swamps that I ever saw, and 

 set out cranberries, now four years ago. The cost per acre of 

 cutting the bushes and the brakes, grubbing up the hassocks 

 and the tangled roots of trees and high blueberry bushes, 

 paring and levelling the surface, carting on sand and setting 

 out the vines, exceeded four hundred dollars. Last year was 

 the third of the experiment and the first crop of any extent; 

 and on about an acre then in bearing, the crop yielded between 

 seven and eight hundred dollars net income. This year I 

 visited the plantation, and it promises far better than the last ; 

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