While there is much barren country on Cape Cod, there are in tillage, including hay lands of all kinds, eleven thousand acres, and of woodland there are some thirty thousand acres. There is good land in almost every section, and in many places there is productive soil. Even in Truro there is good farming, and in the upper towns fine crops are often raised. On the inner side of the Cape, the soil is generally better than on the outer; but there are some marked instances of profitable farming on the outer shore. The lighter soil is warm, and being free from stones it is easily worked, and there are many crops which flourish in it. The yield of English hay, by the last State census, was four thousand one hundred and seventy tons from three thousand eight hundred and fifteen acres. It has been proposed, at different times, to dike-in the vast salt-marshes and convert them into dry land. The soil is deep and rich, and there is little doubt that, if they could be so protected, heavy crops of English hay or of grain could be raised upon them, and, as they are level and of great extent, they could, by coöperation, be tilled by machinery, like prairie farms of the West. If other avenues of activity were not freely open, it is more than likely that these meadows would be reclaimed. The great feature in Cape Cod agriculture is cranberry raising. No other part of the country can compete with the Cape in this. Everywhere lie the cranberry meadows, or bogs, as they are properly called. They form one of the most characteristic features of the landscape. You see them from the car windows, spreading out over level acres, or skirting, with varying width, the running streams; you see them in winding valleys, far below the carriage road; you come upon them suddenly in the woods,--strangely trim, rectangular clearings, darkly shut in by a dense swamp growth. The culture of the cranberry has been reduced to a science. A swamp is cleared of its wild growth of trees and bushes and leveled like a floor; six inches of clear sand are carted on, to cover the heavy bog soil; numerous trenches for the flow of water are cut; a dike is thrown up about the field, and a brook is turned to run through it, with gates, so that the land can be “flowed” in spring to kill insects, and in the fall for protection from frost. Vines are set out at regular intervals, and spreading, they mat the ground. It costs on the average perhaps $400 an acre to transform a rough swamp into a cranberry meadow in bearing condition. One marsh in Barnstable cost $30,000. The profits, however, are large. One meadow, of two or three acres, has repaid six weeks’ annual labor with $1000 a year for twenty years. Another, of half an acre, belonging to Mr. Emulous Small, of Harwichport, an expert in this culture, has yielded ninety-eight barrels in one season. A meadow of sixteen acres, at Marston’s Mills, netted in one year $8000, and another of forty-eight acres, at Newtown,