enty years
have furnished a certain class of gypsies--of whom more anon--with
merchandise which sold well in the neighboring villages and cities.
No one thought of cultivating cranberries; no one, but the gypsies
aforesaid, of gathering them for sale. But it came to pass that a
certain farmer of Hanover was, like many another, unsuccessful during
several years. As a last resource, he purchased of the owner of the Big
House a cranberry-bog,--that is to say, one of the many marshy spots
which are interspersed in the forest,--for which he paid five dollars
the acre. There were a little more than one hundred acres in the bog. At
a cost of some six hundred dollars Mr. F. fenced in his bog, and spent
three months in watching the cranberries as they ripened, to protect
them from depredation. To his intense astonishment, he found, in
October, that the yield was between two and three hundred bushels to the
acre, and that his land and fencing were paid for, with a balance left
over for next year. In consequence of this success, a little mania
for cranberry-farming seized upon the denizens of the Pines, and bogs
acquired a value they had never borne before. This was in 1857. Early in
1858, one of these plots of land, with an adjoining piece of forest, was
rented by Mr. B., who, like a right-down Yankee, determined to cultivate
it himself. So, with the aid of one hired man, a clearing was made in
his forest-patch, a hut built, four miles from the nearest habitation,
and the trees cut down were converted into rails, wherewith to fence in
the cranberry-land. At the time of my visit, the crop was just beginning
to think of getting ripe, and the great lazy vines, each one creeping
for several feet along the ground, were severally loaded with dozens of
delicately-tinted berries, plump and fair as British beauties, which
silently drew to themselves and absorbed the rays of the sun, turning
them to color and succulent subacidulousness. A most glorious sight that
same hundred-acre bog must have been a couple of weeks later, when the
berries had ripened, and a carpet of rosy redness blushed upwards to
the waning sun! Yet 1858 (the even year) was a bad season for
cranberries,--the yield was _only_ sufficient to pay for the land and
fencing, with a modicum over to begin 1859 with!

So cranberries grew to be institutions in the Pines, and all the bogs
for miles around the site of the first experiment were hired by sanguine
farmers. But the cra