se, like a man's plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it. Now
every tree bore fruit--edible fruit, that is. In the case of one
tree, in which they took especial pride, it had originally no fruit at
all--that is, none humanly edible--yet was so beautiful that they wished
to keep it. For nine hundred years they had experimented, and now
showed us this particularly lovely graceful tree, with a profuse crop of
nutritious seeds.

They had early decided that trees were the best food plants, requiring
far less labor in tilling the soil, and bearing a larger amount of food
for the same ground space; also doing much to preserve and enrich the
soil.

Due regard had been paid to seasonable crops, and their fruit and nuts,
grains and berries, kept on almost the year through.

On the higher part of the country, near the backing wall of mountains,
they had a real winter with snow. Toward the south-eastern point, where
there was a large valley with a lake whose outlet was subterranean, the
climate was like that of California, and citrus fruits, figs, and olives
grew abundantly.

What impressed me particularly was their scheme of fertilization. Here
was this little shut-in piece of land where one would have thought an
ordinary people would have been starved out long ago or reduced to an
annual struggle for life. These careful culturists had worked out a
perfect scheme of refeeding the soil with all that came out of it. All
the scraps and leavings of their food, plant waste from lumber work or
textile industry, all the solid matter from the sewage, properly treated
and combined--everything which came from the earth went back to it.

The practical result was like that in any healthy forest; an
increasingly valuable soil was being built, instead of the progressive
impoverishment so often seen in the rest of the world.

When this first burst upon us we made such approving comments that they
were surprised that such obvious common sense should be praised; asked
what our methods were; and we had some difficulty in--well, in
diverting them, by referring to the extent of our own land, and
the--admitted--carelessness with which we had skimmed the cream of it.

At least we thought we had diverted them. Later I found that besides
keeping a careful and accurate account of all we told them, they had a
sort of skeleton chart, on which the things we said and the things we
palpably avoided saying were all set down and studied. It really wa