[Illustration: T]hat clever humorist, Mark Twain, represents himself as once patriotically telling the Secretary of the Treasury, that his annual report was too dry, too statistical; that he ought to get some jokes into it, wood cuts, at least; people read the almanac for the fun, etc. The humorist’s idea is not new. It was unintentionally put into practice by a much respected old geographer, who wrote the statistical treatise on the earth’s surface, which occupied many long hours of our pleasure loving youth, in obstinate efforts at memorizing. That venerable book contained, with wood cuts and all, probably the most successful joke in school literature. We remember this sentence: “The staple productions of North Carolina are tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine.” The picture represented a gloomy forest, a rude still, and a group of dirty men. A crowd of later writers of school geographies have thought this canard on a great state, with varied industries, too good to be lost, but remembering that every ounce of fiction, to be palatable, must contain a drachm of truth, added lumber. It has now been stereotyped, “pitch, tar, turpentine, and lumber.” If anyone has been fooled by the books of his youth, six hours travel from the coast westward, during which he will see broad fields of corn and plantations of cotton and tobacco, will lead him to an appreciation of the “tar-heel joke.” North Carolina does lead all the states in the production of resin and turpentine, but that industry does not employ one-thirtieth of her active capital, nor constitute one-fifteenth of her gross production. Her lumber resources constitute a real and important source of wealth and will receive some attention in this sketch. The state of North Carolina could probably get along without the rest of the world more comfortably than any territory of equal size in the western hemisphere. With its eastern border dipping into the tropical gulf stream and its western border projecting more than a mile skyward, the state possesses a climate almost continental in its range. An old poet describing the spread-eagle breadth of his country said that it stretched “From Maine’s dark pines and crags of snow To where Magnolian breezes blow.” From a climatical and botanical point of view North Carolina is as large as the country described by the poet’s couplet. But it is not the whole state we propose to discuss. That subject is too long for the prescribed brevity of our paper, which will permit us to do but partial justice to the particular section included in the scope of this volume. We begin with agriculture, the most varied of the three divisions of productive industry.