in Barnstable, has yielded in one season, within a year or two, forty two hundred barrels, netting a profit of eighty per cent. There are probably on Cape Cod some thirteen hundred acres of cranberry meadows, from a few rods to fifty acres in size, and the acreage is constantly increasing. The whole crop is from thirty to forty-five thousand barrels, worth from $250,000 to $300,000 on the ground. The picking time is an era in the year. Schools are often closed, and the boys and girls, with many of their elders, turn to gathering the crop; rakes are seldom used, for fear of damage to the berries, which are best picked by hand. The price of picking is not included in the figures given above, and on the whole a substantial amount of ready money is distributed in a thousand tiny rivulets from this industry. There is more forest on Cape Cod, it is said, than there was fifty years ago. Extensive tracts that once were tilled have been left to run to wood, their former names still clinging to them. You will hear of a piece of woodland known as the “Thomas” field or “West New Field.” A farmer dies; his sons have all left home to follow the seas, to keep store in Boston, or to practice law in San Francisco. The first year, the fields are neglected: withered stubble of the year before alone remains to tell of cultivation. Another year, a feeble crop of grass comes stealing in; another summer, unless the land is fated to remain as an “old field,” you will see miniature pitch-pines all over it; another summer yet, and they are bushes; and before you can realize it, the whole field is rejoicing in a vigorous growth. Even in many of the roads you hardly leave the woods. It seems as if a chief business on Cape Cod from the time of Noah had been the making of roads. The village streets and the county highways are often wide; but there are numberless wagon roads that began existence merely as unofficial cart-paths, and by stealthy inroads gradually found favor and wound into the affections of the public until they gained recognition. They are very narrow often, and the trees meet overhead. Sometimes you are tempted to pursue such a way until it turns out a “blind road,” and you can go no further, and can with difficulty turn back. In some of them it is the rarest thing--we might almost say illegal--for two vehicles to meet; if there is a meeting, it takes a certain Yankee planning sometimes to effect an interchange of position. But a man who has passed a score of years or more in riding up and down high-rolling waves thinks nothing of urging a wagon, loaded with cord-wood or oysters, up the steepest bank, or of driving over saplings six feet high, to make a circuit.