of raking after the cart with the big rake, he would change to the little one for a few minutes. Coming back to the big one again always seemed just like play. Then there was a job with a big hoe and a little one that brought in the same principle, which is, after all, the same by which our pious grandmothers urged contentment with our blessings by comparison with those who have none.

With all these tricks George never got to be a really "fast picker." His record day was thirty-six quarts, or a bushel and half a peck of blueberries. There were a few notable pickers who could pick twice or even thrice as many. But for a boy in those days the money for thirty-six quarts looked like a fortune. George used to wonder how the carpenter, who was paid three dollars a day, and the preacher, who received a thousand dollars a year, could manage to take care of such immense sums as they certainly must save. Later on in life he came to see the matter from a different angle.

Until recently blueberries were strictly a wild fruit, Strawberries grow wild in the pastures of New England and have a flavor so much finer than the cultivated ones that it almost repays for hunting hours and hours in the grass to find a few cupfuls. But George used to wonder why blueberries could not be set out, like strawberries, and grow fruits ten times as big as wild. ones, just as strawberries do. This question was solved about ten years ago by Dr. Coville of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He found that blueber

ries, and many of the most beautiful wild flowers, require an acid soil, just the opposite to the ordinary garden soil made rich with alkalies like lime, potash, and ammonia-compounds. If an acid soil garden is prepared, these wild plants grow luxuriantly under cultivation. Indeed, Dr. Coville has established a new industry of blueberry-raising in certain waste lands of New Jersey. By selecting from big-berry wild bushes, and crossing these according to the usual plant breeding methods, he has gone far beyond the "Bonanza" bushes that George Anson used to gloat over, and raises blueberries as big as large cherries with a flavor as fine as that of the wild fruit.

Acid garden culture did not use to be so easy as alkaline, because the proper acid fertilizer was not so easy to obtain. It consisted of decayed leaves and similar wood products, and not of chemicals found in the market. As leaves take long to decay, and not all leaves produce the proper substances, and as most tillable soil is so strongly alkaline that it requires a great deal of the substance to turn it properly acid, the culture of the acid-loving plants was best restricted to lands naturally adapted to them. But as such lands are often the most worthless for ordinary crop purposes, the new departure in acid soil farming was already opening up quite a good deal of new land and promised to add much more worthless land to cultivation.

Recently, however, Dr. Coville and his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture have found a com

mon cheap chemical, called the sulphate of aluminum, which seems to be as practical for acid soil farming as lime is for ordinary farming. The effect is quite durable, for the aluminum of the dressing is replaced by the lime or other constituent of the soil in its chemical combination with the sulphate, and the rain washes away the resulting compound as calcium sulphate, leaving the aluminum permanently in the soil to produce the acid effect required. Such beautiful wild flowers as orchids, rhododendrons and laurel can thus be made to thrive in the ordinary soil, which if not treated to make it acid would be totally unfit to keep them alive. The Department of Agriculture furnishes exact information about the new acid farming.