Speaking of Catshill, Mr. Haggard gives also a very interesting instance of how a colony of people called “Nailers,” who lived formerly by making nails by hand, and compelled to abandon this trade when machine-made nails were introduced, took to agriculture, and how they succeed with it. Some intelligent people having bought a farm of 140 acres and divided it into small farms, from 2½ to 8 acres, these small holdings were offered to the nailers; and at the time of Mr. Haggard’s visit “every instalment which was due had been paid up.” No able-bodied man out of them has gone on to the rates. But the vale of Evesham is still more interesting. Suffice it to say, that while in most rural parishes the population is decreasing, _it rose in the six parishes of the Evesham Union_ from 7,327 to 9,012 in the ten years, 1891 to 1901. Although the soil of this district offers nothing extraordinary, and the conditions of sale are as bad as anywhere, owing to the importance acquired by the middlemen, we see that an extremely important industry of fruit-growing has developed; so important that in the year 1900 about 20,000 tons of fruit and vegetables were sent from the Evesham stations, in addition to large quantities exported from the small stations within a radius of ten miles round Evesham (vol. i., p. 350). The soil, of course, is improved by digging into it large quantities of all sorts of manure--soot, fish guano, leather dust for cabbage (chamois dust being the best), and so on--and the most profitable sorts of fruit-trees and vegetables are continually tested; all this being, of course, not the work of some scientist or of one single man, but the product of the collective experience of the district. It must not be thought, however, that fruit-growing has been overdone. On the contrary, the imports of fruit into the United Kingdom, both for food and for jam-making, continue to be enormous, and to increase every year. Suffice it to say, that this country imports every year about £1,000,000 of tomatoes and £2,000,000 of apples, half a million worth of pears, nearly £730,000 worth of grapes--giving thus a total of £4,200,000 worth of all fruit. And at the same time we learn that immense quantities of land go every year out of culture, to be transformed into game reserves for rich Englishmen and foreigners.