uch
the same way your husband knows horses. Each tree is just as much an
individual to them as a horse is to me. They know each tree, its whole
history, everything that ever happened to it, its every idiosyncrasy.
They have their fingers on its pulse. They can tell if it's feeling as
well to-day as it felt yesterday. And if it isn't, they know why and
proceed to remedy matters for it. They can look at a tree in bloom and
tell how many boxes of apples it will pack, and not only that--they'll
know what the quality and grades of those apples are going to be. Why,
they know each individual apple, and they pick it tenderly, with love,
never hurting it, and pack it and ship it tenderly and with love, and
when it arrives at market, it isn't bruised nor rotten, and it fetches
top price.

"Yes, it's more than intensive. These Adriatic Slavs are long-headed in
business. Not only can they grow apples, but they can sell apples. No
market? What does it matter? Make a market. That's their way, while our
kind let the crops rot knee-deep under the trees. Look at Peter Mengol.
Every year he goes to England, and he takes a hundred carloads of yellow
Newton pippins with him. Why, those Dalmatians are showing Pajaro apples
on the South African market right now, and coining money out of it hand
over fist."

"What do they do with all the money?" Saxon queried.

"Buy the Americans of Pajaro Valley out, of course, as they are already
doing."

"And then?" she questioned.

Benson looked at her quickly.

"Then they'll start buying the Americans out of some other valley. And
the Americans will spend the money and by the second generation start
rotting in the cities, as you and your husband would have rotted if you
hadn't got out."

Saxon could not repress a shudder.--As Mary had rotted, she thought; as
Bert and all the rest had rotted; as Tom and all the rest were rotting.

"Oh, it's a great country," Benson was continuing. "But we're not a
great people. Kipling is right. We're crowded out and sitting on the
stoop. And the worst of it is there's no reason we shouldn't know
better. We're teaching it in all our agricultural colleges, experiment
stations, and demonstration trains. But the people won't take hold, and
the immigrant, who has learned in a hard school, beats them out. Why,
after I graduated, and before my father died--he was of the old school
and laughed at what he called my theories--I traveled for a couple of
years. I wanted