it was dug up. A few potato-vines
were planted, perhaps a peach tree. There were the preliminary signs
of a fence. In the third, under the stimulus of a price offered by the
management, a garden was evolved, with, necessarily, a fence. At this
point the potato became suddenly an element. It had fed the family the
winter before without other outlay than a little scratching of the
ground. Its possibilities loomed large. The garden became a farm on a
small scale. Its owner applied for more land and got it. That was the
very purpose of the colony.

A woman, with a strong face and shrewd, brown eyes, rose from an onion
bed she had been weeding to open the gate.

"Come in," she said, "and be welcome." Upon a wall of the best room
hung a picture of Michael Bakounine, the nihilist. I found it in these
colonies everywhere side by side with Washington's, Lincoln's, and
Baron de Hirsch's. Mrs. Breslow and her husband left home for cause.
He was a carpenter. Nine months they starved in a Forsyth Street
tenement, paying $15 a month for three rooms. This cottage is their
own. They have paid for it ($800) since they came out with the first
settlers. The lot was given to them, but they bought the adjoining one
to raise truck in.

"_Gott sei dank_," says the woman, with shining eyes, "we owe nothing
and pay no rent, and are never more hungry."

Down the street a little way is the cottage of one who received the
first prize for her garden last year. Fragrant box hedges in the plot.
A cow with crumpled horn stands munching corncobs at the barn. Four
hens are sitting in as many barrels, eying the stranger with
half-anxious, half-hostile looks. A topknot, tied by the leg to the
fence, struggles madly to escape. The children bring dandelions and
clover to soothe its captivity.

The shadows lengthen. The shop gives up its workers. There is no
overtime here. A ten-hour day rules. Families gather upon porches--the
mother with the sleeping babe at her breast, the grandfather smoking a
peaceful pipe, while father and the boys take a turn tending the
garden. Theirs is not paradise. It is a little world full of hard
work, but a world in which the work has ceased to be a curse. Ludlow
Street, with its sweltering tenements, is but a few hours' journey
away. For these, at all events, the problem of life has been solved.

Strolling over the outlying farms, we came to one with every mark of
thrift and prosperity about it. The vineyard was pruned