Professor W. J. Spillman, of the Agricultural Department, visited him in 1903, and studied the methods employed.  Then, he says, the rush to see the farm became so great that the owner had to give it up.

Few people who know nothing about it, and won’t learn, can take even three acres and make anything off it.  To get the phenomenal yields takes capital—­sometimes large capital, wisely spent.  Sometimes we read of immense products “per acre”; this often means the product of a single rod of ground, this gives at the rate of so much “per acre,” or might, if extended.

But any one can take a little bit of ground and use it thoroughly and increase his borders and his knowledge as he goes on.  He will find plenty to pay him for doing or teaching whatever he has learned to do that no one else has done “If a man make but a mousetrap better than his fellows, though he makes his tent in the wilderness, the world will beat a path to his door.”

The mission of this book is accomplished if it interests you to consider the possibilities of making a living on a few acres and leads you to investigate.  It is not written as a textbook, for, as has been shown, there are authorities enough cited to supply all the technical information needed

Its sole object is to show what has been done and what can be done on small areas and to show that life in the country need not be so laborious if the same methods are used which make successes of business in other lines.

If it does this and is the means of checking in any degree the reckless trend of people from the country to the cities, the author will feel that his efforts have been well repaid.

CHAPTER XXII

THE WOOD LOT

If you have a bit of woods on your little farm, take care of it.  By intelligent thinning you can make an average income of five dollars per acre from ordinary second growth wild woods.  The cord wood, barrel hoops, fence posts, and so on will decrease your expenses, while the timber will increase in value.  That lot is the place to start your boy as a forester.

Instructions how to treat the trees can be obtained from your State Forestry Department or from the National Forest Service at Washington:  the care of growing timber is a big subject and requires study, but don’t sell your standing timber without their advice.  Forestry can hardly be made to pay on a small lot with hired labor or hired teams, and you must not pay much for your wood lot, else interest and taxes will eat up the returns.

To be of high quality, timber must be, to a considerable proportion of its height, free of limbs, which are the cause of knots; it must be tall; and it must not decrease rapidly in diameter from the butt to the top of the last log.  In a dense stand of timber there is very great competition for sunlight among the individual trees, with the result that height growth is increased.  Trees in crowded stands are taller than those in uncrowded stands of the same age.  When the trees are crowded so that sunlight does not reach the lower branches, these soon die and become brittle they then fall off or are broken off by the wind, snow, or other agencies.  By this process trunks are formed which are free from limbs, and hence of high quality.