four more will put the owner on
"Easy Street."

In the bottom-lands of the Sacramento River is an island that for fifty
years went a-begging. Then a company with a shrewd head bought it, diked
it, and drained it. Now the island has immense celery beds and the
largest asparagus farm in the world. The celery and canned asparagus are
shipped to the produce markets of New York City.

Another great swamp area covers a large part of Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Arkansas. This swamp was made when the head of the Gulf of Mexico
reached half-way up to St. Louis, for the delta of the Mississippi River
has been travelling leisurely southward for several thousand years--so
leisurely, in fact, that Iberville and Bienville opened the region to
settlement fifteen hundred years or more too soon. But Uncle Sam is
taking a hand here likewise, and in another fifty years a population
half as large as that of New York may not only live comfortably but get
rich on the reclaimed lands of this and adjacent coast swamps.

The Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia all have large areas of coast
marshes--"pocosons" they call them--only a small part of which has been
reclaimed. Formerly these were the property of the general government;
then they were given to the States with the understanding that they were
to be reclaimed. Large tracts were sold to speculators for a few cents
an acre, and there you are! Few States are rich enough to handle
extensive reclamation enterprises, and so the general government stepped
in again and assumed the responsibility. That means that the work of
reclamation will be skilfully and honestly done. Uncle Sam may play some
questionable politics, but he never mixes politics and government
business.

Of all the swamp lands of the United States, the region in Florida
known as the Everglades is the most interesting and the most romantic.

Ponce de Leon, an aged Spanish governor of Porto Rico, who was seeking
the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, discovered--not the long-sought
fountain, but a peninsula decked with such a profusion of flowers that
he named the country Florida.

From that time until years after it was ceded to the United States
Florida was repeatedly baptized in blood. From the first there were
encounters between the Spanish and Indians in which no quarter was given
on either side. Later, an exterminating warfare broke out between the
French and Spanish when a Huguenot colony was massacred and not a man,
woman,