You can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of Darien or Norwalk.  In a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth as a knife—­or you find new grass in a place which you remember as a swamp.  Perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers themselves, digging with their pick and spade—­for all summer long the Mosquito Man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task.

You might even find him in New York some off-day—­and you will know him, for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that the tank on his roof is unscreened.  For they do say that he carries his activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do say that, when he was in Italy not so very long ago, he went out to investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night before.

“Now you must oil your swamp,” said he to the innkeeper.

That night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed the order to the best of his ability.  He had poured all of his best olive oil on the mosquito marsh.

* * * * *

(Country Gentleman)

Five half-tone illustrations, with the following captions: 
  1.  “A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile.”
  2.  “Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods.”
  3.  “Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville.”
  4.  “Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara
       County Farm Bureau, New York.”
  5.  “Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers.”

A COUNTY SERVICE STATION

WHERE NEW YORK FARMERS GET HELP IN THEIR FRUIT GROWING AND MARKETING
PROBLEMS

BY D. H. WILLIAMS

You’ve got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county’s farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete.  You’ve got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers.

As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county’s economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct class by itself.

Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its northern line.  A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.

Forty-eight hours to Chicago’s markets, the same distance to New York’s; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself—­Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda—­operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls—­these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident.