For there is nothing difficult about growing clams, nothing half so difficult and expensive as growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam farm offers most remarkable opportunities, although the bid, it must be confessed, is pretty plainly to one’s love of ease and one’s willing dependence. To begin with, the clam farm is self-working, ploughed, harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for him by the hands of the tide; but only on those flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar, where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating “spats,” and carrying them swiftly on the flood, broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes. While this cannot happen generally, still the clam-farmer has a second distinct advantage in having his seed, if not actually sown for him, at least grown, and caught for him on these natural breeding-bars, in such quantities that he need only sweep it up and cradle it, as he might winnow grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island Sound there is such a bar, where it seems that Nature, in expectation of the coming clam farm, had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal currents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the entire state with its yearly stock of seed. With all of this there is little of romance about a clam farm, and nothing at all spectacular about its financial returns. For clams are clams, whereas cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs and ginseng roots, are different,--according to the advertisements. The inducements of the clam farm are not sufficient to cause the prosperous Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East, as he has been selling out and going on to the farther West, for its larger, cheaper farms, and bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, whatever we have had to do, in fact, directly with Nature, has been for us, thus far, a speculation and a gamble. Earnings have been out of all proportion to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not earn, we _strike_ it rich; and we have struck it rich so long in this vast rich land, that the strike has lost its element of luck, being now the expected thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and move on to the farthest West, where there is still a land of chance. But that land is passing, and with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is approaching when a man will pay for a western farm what he now pays for an eastern farm--the actual market value, based upon what the land, in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield. Values will rise to an even, normal level; earnings will settle to the same level; and the clam farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie will yield alike--a living; and if, when that day comes, there is no more “Promised Land” for the American, it will be because we have crossed over, and possessed the land, and divided it among us for an inheritance.