MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 241 



unused to formal investigation is apt to bring 

 forward the awkward facts that confront him every 

 day, without measuring their relations. It appears 

 in the end that Mr. Sloman pays out some four to 

 five hundred dollars a year for labor in addition to 

 his own and that of his boy of fifteen. Reckoning 

 this at five to six hundred more, it would appear that 

 the needed labor upon a farm of fifty acres under 

 ordinary cultivation would be not far from a thou- 

 sand dollars. Meeting this, and the taxes, and " put- 

 ting by " some four or five hundred from his returns, 

 the country proprietor thinks he is doing a very fair 

 thing. When a man of this stamp is confronted with 

 such statements as appear from sanguine Western 

 vineyardists, about a return of six thousand dollars 

 per acre for land in vines, "prepared with the 

 plow at a cost of twenty-five dollars the acre," he 

 simply puts a fresh quid in his cheek, and indulges in 

 remarks not creditable to the veracity of the vine- 

 yardist. 



I am inclined to think that the real truth lies mid- 

 way between the parties. Mr. Sloman, with his old- 

 fashioned habits, is not accomplishing the half that 

 ought to be accomplished with his fifty-acre farm ; 

 the not unfrequent extraordinary representations of 

 vineyard product, on the other hand, I cannot but 

 regard as palpable exaggerations. I have not the 

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