III. The fairest single test of good farming is the increasing productiveness of the soil. That farm which averaged twenty bushels of grain to the acre twenty years ago, twenty-five bushels ten years ago, and will measure up thirty bushels to the acre from this year's crop, has been and is in good hands. I know no other touchstone of Farming so unerring as that of the increase or decrease from year to year of its aggregate product. If you would convince me that X. is a good farmer, do not tell me of some great crop he has just grown, but show me that his crop has regularly increased from year to year, and I am satisfied. --I shall have more to say on these points as I proceed. It suffices for the present if I have clearly indicated what I mean by Good and what by Bad Farming. III. WHERE TO FARM. When my father was over sixty years old, and had lived some twenty years in Erie County, Pennsylvania, he said to me: "I have several times removed, and always toward the West; I shall never remove again; but, were I to do so, it would be toward the East. Experience has taught me that the advantages of every section are counterbalanced by disadvantages, and that, where any crop is easily produced, there it sells low, and sometimes cannot be sold at all. I shall live and die right here; but, were I to remove again, it would not be toward the West." This is but one side of a truth, and I give it for whatever it may be worth. Had my father plunged into the primitive forest in his twenty-fifth rather than his forty-fifth year, he would doubtless have become more reconciled to pioneer life than he ever did. I would advise no one over forty years of age to undertake, with scanty means, to dig a farm out of the dense forest, where great trees must be cut down and cut up, rolled into log-heaps, and hurried to ashes where they grew. Where half the timber can be sold for enough to pay the cost of cutting, the case is different; but I know right well that digging a farm out of the high woods is, to any but a man of wealth, a slow, hard task. Making one out of naked prairie, five to ten miles from timber, is less difficult, but not much. He who can locate where he has good timber on one side and rich prairie on the other is fortunate, and may hope, if his health be spared, to surround himself with every needed comfort within ten years. Still, the pioneer's life is a rugged one, especially for women and children; and I should advise any man who is worth $2,000 and has a family, to buy out an "improvement" (which, in most cases, badly needs improving) on the outskirt of civilization, rather than plunge into the pathless forest or push out upon the unbroken prairie. I rejoice that our Public Lands are free to actual settlers; I believe that many are thereby enabled to make for themselves homes who otherwise would have nothing to leave their children; yet I much prefer a home within the boundaries of civilization to one clearly beyond them. There is a class