is very pretty.  The horse and the pigs are practical, if you can take care of them yourself; pigs are good farm catch-alls.  If you have to pay a man to do it, you had better hire your horses and buy your pork.

Two well-groomed, healthy cows, one calving in the spring and one in the autumn, can be made a source of profit, and of valuable manure, if you have land enough in a neighborhood where up-to-date parents are willing to pay ten to twenty cents a quart for pure milk for their infants or even for family use.  But your land and your own baby’s care and milk will probably be enough for you to attend to promptly and thoroughly every day—­and night.

It is an age-old experience that if we take care of a little land, the land will take care of us.  In Ferrero’s “Grandezza e Decadenza di Roma” is an interesting account of Marcus Terentius Varro’s “De Re Rustica.”  Varro wrote in the year 37 B.C., and as he was then eighty years old, he had seen the transformation of Italy from an agricultural to a manufacturing, trading community and the accompanying wreck of the old agricultural system, which, of course, he laments.

The growth of vast landed estates largely held by imperial favorites, as Pliny said, destroyed Italy.  So fearful has the destruction been that it is only in our generation that the Campagna at Rome, which was once an intensely fruitful quilt of garden patches, has been reclaimed from the fever-smitten swamp to which vast landlordism had reduced it.

In the third book of “De Re Rustica,” Varro recommends as his remedy, intensive cultivation close to the cities, and the breeding of “fancy stock,” including pigeons’ snails, peacocks, deer, and wild boars.

He tells how an aunt of his made 60,000 sesterces ($3000) in one year by raising thrushes for the Roman market, at a time when an excellent farm of about 200 acres only yielded 30,000 sesterces per annum.  He quotes another case of one who made 40,000 sesterces per annum from a flock of one hundred peacocks, by selling the eggs and the young.  Those old Roman women weren’t so slow.

Ferraro calls Varro’s work one of the most important for the history of ancient Italy and says historians have made a mistake in not reading it.

At the time of the migration of the barbarians (350 to 750 A.D.), the lot of each able-bodied man was about thirty morgen (equal to twenty acres) on average lands, on very good ground only ten to fifteen morgen (equal to seven or ten acres), four morgen being equal to one hectare.  Of this land, at least a third, and sometimes a half, was left uncultivated each year.  The remainder of the fifteen to twenty morgen sufficed to feed and fatten into giants the immense families of these child-producing Germans, and this in spite of the primitive technique, whereby at least half the productive capacity of a day was lost. (From “The State,” by Franz Oppenheimer, p. 11.)

In the Orange Judd prize contest, merely for the clearest account of a garden, not for results at all, a number of the contestants raised produce at the rate of $150 to $400 per acre and over, even in semi-arid regions; for instance, L. E. Burnham says that he raised on his first garden of about one third of an acre in eastern Massachusetts, garden stuff which he sold to summer cottagers for $61.69.