Peasant Life in the Black Forest 



64 1 



A NURSERY IN THE BLACK FOREST 



comes an expert in an occupation which 

 he enters for life. 



The same kind of economy which is 

 applied to road-making- and forestry is 

 applied with equal skill to farming. The 

 farms are uniformly small, averaging, 

 as a rule, from three to seven acres and 

 ranging in value from two hundred to 

 five hundred dollars per acre. These 

 garden-like patches which fleck the val- 

 ley, when seen from an elevation, present 

 the appearance of a crazy quilt with a 

 green background. No hedges nor 

 fences intervene to suggest mine and 

 thine, nor is there, as in rural England, 

 an agricultural class distinction. There 

 are no landlords and no tenants, and the 

 entire community is a neighborly congre- 

 gation, where the land of the villagers 

 and peasants lies side by side and where 

 mutual assistance is freely rendered dur- 

 ing the hay and harvest season. 



Cattle constitute the chief live-stock of 

 the community, but they are never al- 

 lowed to graze, being housed winter and 

 summer and fed upon hay and meadow 

 grass cut by the scythe and doled out in 

 quantities to entail the least loss and net 

 the greatest returns. 



Every meadow yields annually two 

 crops of hay, and as moisture is a neces- 

 sary agency to the rapid growth of vege- 

 tation, the dry, sloping elevations are 

 often irrigated, while the lower levels 

 are drained by numerous tiny ditches. 

 Thus the mountain brooks, as they 

 emerge from the forest rim in the upper 

 part of the valley, are often walled and 

 led along the upper edge of the fields 

 and meadows to supply the moisture in 

 the absence of rain and to retard the ero- 

 sion of the alluvial deposits. 



Thus every foot of arable land is kept 

 fertile ; not a nook nor corner of the 



