In many instances even the quick methods of the reclamation authorities are too slow for the California farmer, and so he takes matters into his own hands. First he acquires his land; then he mortgages all his worldly possessions to surround the land with a ditch deep enough and wide enough to make a dike high enough to keep out flood waters. His land after draining is full of the stuff for which he otherwise would pay thousands and thousands of dollars. Phosphates and lime form the coverings of minute swamp life and nitrogen compounds are a part of their bodies. The polders of Holland are not richer than this swamp land; indeed, they are not so rich. One or two crops will pretty nearly extinguish the mortgage and three or four more will put the owner on "Easy Street." In the bottom-lands of the Sacramento River is an island that for fifty years went a-begging. Then a company with a shrewd head bought it, diked it, and drained it. Now the island has immense celery beds and the largest asparagus farm in the world. The celery and canned asparagus are shipped to the produce markets of New York City. Another great swamp area covers a large part of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This swamp was made when the head of the Gulf of Mexico reached half-way up to St. Louis, for the delta of the Mississippi River has been travelling leisurely southward for several thousand years--so leisurely, in fact, that Iberville and Bienville opened the region to settlement fifteen hundred years or more too soon. But Uncle Sam is taking a hand here likewise, and in another fifty years a population half as large as that of New York may not only live comfortably but get rich on the reclaimed lands of this and adjacent coast swamps. The Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia all have large areas of coast marshes--"pocosons" they call them--only a small part of which has been reclaimed. Formerly these were the property of the general government; then they were given to the States with the understanding that they were to be reclaimed. Large tracts were sold to speculators for a few cents an acre, and there you are! Few States are rich enough to handle extensive reclamation enterprises, and so the general government stepped in again and assumed the responsibility. That means that the work of reclamation will be skilfully and honestly done. Uncle Sam may play some questionable politics, but he never mixes politics and government business. Of all the swamp lands of the United States, the region in Florida known as the Everglades is the most interesting and the most romantic. Ponce de Leon, an aged Spanish governor of Porto Rico, who was seeking the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, discovered--not the long-sought fountain, but a peninsula decked with such a profusion of flowers that he named the country Florida.