NEW-YORK MARKETS.-—NO. 1. 
77 
world are daily eating. Another premium is off¬ 
ered for the best-managed farm, for five years. 
Another for the best and exemplary young 
farmer. Another is talked of to be awarded 
to the mother who best fits her daughters to 
become farmers’ wives. 
Effects of Offers of Premiums for the Best Crop 
of Wheat .—In a county, where everybody said 
the power of the soil to produce wheat had been 
long exhausted, one farmer has produced 30 
bushels and six quarts to the acre, of the Black- 
Sea variety. His process was to plant one year 
in corn, with manure spread and plowed in 
eight inches deep. For the wheat, he used a 
light compost, five cords to the acre, valued at 
$7.50, and eleven bushels of unleached ashes, 
valued at $1.37f Total, $8,87^. The wheat 
was worth at home, $1.50 a bushel. Another 
person raised 29, a third 24, and another 
19 bushels to the acre. 
The secret of the great success of all of these 
gentlemen was deep plowing, thorough drain¬ 
ing, and high manuring. Colonel Wilder very 
justly remarks, “ it is just as easy to feed a crop 
of wheat, as it is to feed an ox; and with more 
certainty of producing a profitable result.” 
NEW-YORK MARKETS—No. 1. 
Thousands of our readers have never visited 
this metropolis—perhaps have never seen a 
great city market place, where the daily food 
of many thousand human beings is exposed for 
sale. It used to be, in our youthful days, a 
great mystery to us, how so many persons as 
we were told, dwelt in places where the roads 
were all paved with stones, and the houses 
touched each other, could live without a pork 
barrel, potato cellar, pig pen, or hen roost, and 
where they not only bought their milk, but 
water, too. 
The mystery is not yet quite cleared up in 
our minds, though we have no doubt now about 
the abundant supply of provisions; but how 
all, who eat, obtain their food, is another 
question. If we could draw truthful pictures 
of city life for farmers’ sons and daughters to 
look at, it would teach them to love their own 
homes—they would contrast their plain, but 
wholesome, sweet and clean food, with some of 
the miserable stuff sold in our markets, and ex¬ 
claim, “ God made the country—man made the 
town”—let us be contented with His work. 
With a view to add to that contentment, we 
propose to devote a few pages of the present 
volume, in giving some slight sketches of our 
market places—those great marts of things, 
clean and unclean, upon which human life is 
here sustained. It may be instructive and 
amusing to those who have not yet availed 
themselves of the cheap facilities of railroad 
travelling, to visit New York, to fancy them¬ 
selves taking a stroll with us among hecatombs 
of oxen, mountains of mutton, pyramids of 
pork, and piles of poultry, in Fulton Market. Ho 
not fancy you will see a palace nor a market 
house that is an ornament to the city, like those 
of some of tfie towns in Canada, nor like Quincy 
Market, at Boston. On the contrary, you will 
find it a common, dirty-looking, one-story build¬ 
ing, with an arched roof, about two hundred feet 
square, three sides of which are elevated so as to 
form basement rooms underneath the floor that 
contains the butchers’ stalls, which extend in 
a double line along two sides of the house, while 
the third is occupied by a scaly company, com¬ 
posed of all manner of fish that swim in the 
waters between Cape Cod and Cape Fear. 
The central portion, which is on a level with 
the street, is also roofed over, paved, and is oc¬ 
cupied with a mixed multitude of everything 
that is eatable, to say nothing of that portion 
which is not. Here you will see an uncounted 
and an uncountable quantity of barrels, boxes, 
baskets, tubs, and stacks of vegetables and fruit; 
and tons of poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, lard, and 
tallow, in all sorts of packages, except those in 
which neatness is particularly predominant. 
Upon one side of the square, is a row of dreary¬ 
looking cells, in which a large number of peo¬ 
ple are continually eating a great number of 
oysters, stewed, raw, and roasted. The quan¬ 
tity of this kind of food consumed in this city, 
if it could be correctly ascertained, would sur¬ 
pass belief. 
Around the market house, upon the pavement, 
are the retailers of apples, nuts, cakes, and all 
sorts of trinkets and nick-nacks. Here sits an 
old woman knitting, by the side of the same 
table at which she has sat for many a long 
year. She not only sells the products of her 
own labor, but that of a great number of sets 
of knitting needles, busily plied around some 
country fires. A little further on, sits another 
and another, selling all manner of fruits in their 
season. What a listless life, to sit all day long 
in the same place, day after day and year after 
year, trafficking by the cent’s worth with every 
person passing by, who desires to gratify his 
longing for the luscious fruit spread out to 
tempt his appetite. Here sits a woman week 
after week through the fall months, cracking 
hickory nuts unceasingly. All these market 
