'At first I paid little attention to this question, but after a little while it was asked again, and that by several men in succession, and I soon found that the people of the place had little room for anything else in their thoughts. There was good reason for it too. Their last harvest had been a poor one. Three-tenths was about the yield. They too with their three-tenths were comparatively well off. Some distance from them the yield had not been more than two-tenths, and a little beyond that again, there were fields which had been sown, but never reaped. There had been nothing to reap. Nothing had grown. I passed some of these fields afterwards and saw them. Was it wonderful then that the main thought in their minds should be the harvest failure, and that they should be mainly anxious to know how to secure a good season next year? Looking at my audience I saw that nine-tenths of them were poorly clad. Nearly one-half of them were quite insufficiently clothed, and many were in garments suited to summer weather only. I was in a sheepskin coat and felt shoes, and even thus was not too warm, and could not help thinking how cold they must be, in their torn clothes and ordinary shoes. In addition to this they seemed hungry. I dare say perhaps one-half of them were in actual suffering from deficiency of food. 'Taking these things into consideration, I did not regard their great and often-repeated question, "How about the harvest?" as impertinent, and set myself to answer it. When the question was again asked I replied by asking another, namely, "_Do you think you deserve good harvests?_" This question usually made them stare and ask, "Why should not we deserve good harvests?" and I would reply, "In the first place, because of that _tobacco pipe in your mouth_." A laugh of incredulity would usually pass round the audience, but when done laughing, and asked to consider the folly of spending money buying a pipe and tobacco when the smoker was shivering in his rags, and hungry, and especially when asked what was the good of smoking, they laughed no more. When pressed to say where the tobacco came from, they would admit that the cultivation of tobacco took up no small proportion of their better-class land, and when pressed to say how much land was given up to tobacco cultivation, they would admit, what did not seem to have occurred to them before, that the amount of land given up to tobacco cultivation was very large. How large it was I had no conception till the following summer, when, walking round the suburbs, I would look over the low mud walls of their gardens, and be amazed at the expanse of land covered with the great, broad green leaf of the flourishing tobacco plant.