The farm we were lucky enough to acquire was one of the old-fashioned, practical places, with a full equipment of buildings. Under the cow-barn there was a stone basement, used for the winter storing of root crops. After our dairy herd developed, it seemed wise to use ensilage instead of roots during the winter. So we built a silo, and this left the store-house vacant. It was eighty feet long and fifteen feet wide, so, after we conceived the mushroom idea, we partitioned off thirty feet to retain as a storing-place for household vegetables and fitted up the other fifty feet with mushroom-beds. We put in a brooder-house stove and pipe system, which cost one hundred and twenty dollars. The lumber for the beds cost an additional thirty dollars, extra manure twenty-two dollars and spawn fifty dollars--two hundred and twenty-two dollars in all. Four months later we had received four hundred and forty-five dollars. Since then the returns have fluctuated between four and five hundred dollars, and we estimate that it costs one hundred and twenty-five dollars per season to produce the crop. So I think that mushrooms can be considered profitable when run in connection with poultry or general farming, especially as they come in at a season of the year when there is very little else to be attended to, and, what is more, the only heavy work is preparing manure and compost for the beds, and that any ordinary farm man can accomplish. The rest is all so light and easy that a young girl or a delicate woman can attend to it without fatigue. It is not necessary to have an expensive stone or brick building. We have a neighbour who uses part of an old cow-stable, and a man in the suburbs of New York, who grows a quantity each season, has simply a dugout with rough board walls, two feet above the ground, and an A-shaped roof--all covered with tar-paper, a place that could not have cost more than seventy-five dollars at the very most. A shed or outbuilding of any kind will answer if it is weather-proof and can be kept at a temperature of fifty-five or sixty in zero weather without much expense. [Illustration: MUSHROOMS] Don’t be tempted to start on any elaborate scale in the house-cellar, for the odour from the beds whilst the manure is heating prior to planting-time will permeate the entire house and cling to carpets and draperies in a most horrible way. Of course, this does not obtain when only a few are to be raised for the home table, because shallow boxes can be used and need not be carried into the cellar until the objectionable period is past.