Other growers move off to a warmer climate, within one or two days' ride of the great city by railroad, and, by help of hotter suns, crowd their half-ripened fruits into Northern markets nearly a month in advance of local cultivators. Only those varieties being grown which are naturally earlier than all others, they blush into redness while ours have scarcely reached their full size. Taken from the vines in an unripe condition, they are crisp and firm, and the fast express-train whirls them over hundreds of miles, the ripening process, as well as the decaying one, going on meanwhile. It is costly transportation to the growers, but the impatient public pay with readiness a price so extravagant as to make for these wholesale pioneers a stupendous profit. Thus the warm alluvial lands encircling Norfolk fill the markets from Baltimore to Boston with the earliest fruit. It is unripe, and deficient in the full flavor of the strawberry; but what care the wealthy public for that? It is the first in market,--they have been a year without it,--it has somewhat of the genuine aroma,--and, ripe or unripe, they cannot refrain. Great sums are annually realized by these earliest caterers for the public palate. The hot-house process is comparatively a retail operation; but this traffic reaches to the dignity of a great industrial enterprise, employing hundreds of hands, pouring ample freightage into the coffers of express-companies, and enriching the men by whom it is conducted. It is exclusively the offspring of Northern shrewdness, the sluggish instincts of the Southerner unfitting him for an occupation requiring incessant activity and promptness,--while its apparent littleness, the peddling of strawberries, were unworthy a race whose inheritance is cotton or tobacco. For a few weeks these cultivators have entire possession of the Northern market. In time, however, our suns become hotter, ripening the fruits of our own fields. Then comes the rivalry among ourselves,--who shall be earliest with the best fruit;--for herein lies an important element of general success.