iiig glamour to the view. I have known, I should say, 

 • dozens of men, some of them clergymen, who have invested 

 hard-earned thousands of dollars in orange-groves in 

 Florida. I do not know one who, at this date, has received 

 any fair return for his invested money ; or any one who, as 

 I think, would not do well to sell out his investment at 

 fifty or even twenty-five cents on a dollar. I know, on the 

 other hand, a farmer in Maine who gave himself intelli- 

 gently and industriously to the cultivation of an apple- 

 orchard, giving to it the same sort of discriminating care 

 that must be given to orange-groves in Florida or peach 

 orchards in Maryland; and the last I knew of the man, and 

 it was only two years ago that I saw him on his farm, his 

 apple-orchard, Avhich was not of very great size, had for 

 several years netted him an annual return of five hundred 

 dollars clean money. 



I remember the time when the claim was made that 

 Kansas was the farmers' paradise. And I cannot as an 

 American be sorry that enough New Englanders went to 

 Kansas to bring that territory into the Union as a free 

 state. But in the last census I read that there are twenty- 

 one towns in Kansas which have now not a single inhabi- 

 tant. Farming in those towns has failed utterly. We 

 have some deserted hill-farms in New England, but not 

 many I suppose in Essex County, — -and these New Eng- 

 land hill-farms, as I find in many instances, are deserted 

 because they ought never to have been chosen instead of 

 the fertile valleys below them ; and these deserted hill- 

 farms in New England are furthermore now being in many 

 cases recovered by amateur farmers from the city who like 

 picturesque views so well that they are willing to spend 

 some money in farming and buy their vegetables of their 

 neighbors. But when an entire town is deserted, as has 

 been the case repeatedly in the new western country, we 

 can scarcely measure the disappointment and suffering 

 which the grim fact implies. A brave struggle was in 



