Add cream, fresh butter, buttermilk, fresh eggs.  Only one of all the things on page one grows with any flavour here at all—­strawberries; and only one or two more grow at all.  Darned if I don’t have to confront Cabbage every day.  I haven’t yet surrendered, and I never shall unless the Germans get us.  Cabbage and Germans belong together:  God made ’em both the same stinking day.

Now get a bang-up gardener no matter what he costs.  Get him started.  Put it up to him to start toward the foregoing programme, to be reached in (say) three years—­two if possible.  He must learn to grow these things absolutely better than they are now grown anywhere on earth.  He must get the best seed.  He must get muck out of the swamp, manure from somewhere, etc. etc.  He must have the supreme flavour in each thing.  Let him take room enough for each—­plenty of room.  He doesn’t want much room for any one thing, but good spaces between.

     This will be the making of the world.  Talk about fairs?  If he fails
     to get every prize he must pay a fine for every one that goes to
     anybody else.

How we’ll live!  I can live on these things and nothing else.  But (just to match this home outfit) I’ll order tea from Japan, ripe olives from California, grape fruit and oranges from Florida.  Then poor folks will hang around, hoping to be invited to dinner!

     Plant a few fig trees now; and pecans?  Any good?

The world is going to come pretty close to starvation not only during the war but for five or perhaps ten years afterward.  An acre or two done right—­divinely right—­will save us.  An acre or two on my land in Moore County—­no king can live half so well if the ground be got ready this spring and such a start made as one natural-born gardener can make.  The old Russian I had in Garden City was no slouch.  Do you remember his little patch back of the house?  That far, far, far excelled anything in all Europe.  And you’ll recall that we jarred ’em and had good things all winter.

This St. Ives is the finest spot in England that I’ve ever seen.  To-day has been as good as any March day you ever had in North Carolina—­a fine air, clear sunshine, a beautiful sea—­looking out toward the United States; and this country grows—­the best golf links that I’ve ever seen in the world, and nothing else worth speaking of but—­tin.  Tin mines are all about here.  Tin and golf are good crops in their way, but they don’t feed the belly of man.  As matters stand the only people that have fit things to eat now in all Europe are the American troops in France, and their food comes out of tins chiefly.  Ach!  Heaven!  In these islands man is amphibious and carnivorous.  It rains every day and meat, meat, meat is the only human idea of food.  God bless us, one acre of the Sandhills is worth a vast estate of tin mines and golf links to feed the innards of

     Yours affectionately,