As to the Far West--the Plains, the Parks, and the Great Basin--there is more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of choice trees--Hickory, White Oak, Locust, Chestnut, and White Pine--within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which he has made or is making provision to irrigate--may begin to sell trees therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth for a century--at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of uses in addition to that. * * * * * --But this paper grows too long, and I must postpone to the next my more especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting. IX. PLANTING AND GROWING TREES. Whoever has recently bought, inherited, or otherwise become the owner of a farm, has usually found some part or parts of it devoted to wood; and this, if not in excess, he will mainly preserve, while he studies and plans with a view to the ultimate devotion to timber of just those portions of his land that are best adapted to that use. In locating that timber, I would have him consider these suggestions: I. Land wisely planted with trees, and fenced so far as need be to keep out cattle, costs nothing. Whatever else you grow involves labor and expenditure; trees grow of their own accord. You may neglect them utterly--may wander over the earth and be absent for ten or twenty years, while your fences decay and your fields are overcropped to exhaustion; even your meadows may be run out by late mowing and close feeding at both ends of the season, till a dozen acres will hardly subsist a span of horses and a cow; but your woods need only to be let alone to insure that their value shall have decidedly increased during your absence. They will richly reward labor and care in thinning, trimming, and transplanting--you may profitably employ in them any time that you can spare them--but they will do very well if simply let alone. And, unlike any other product with which I am acquainted, you may take crop after crop of wood from the same lot, and the soil will be richer and more productive after the last than it was before the first. Whether wholly because their roots permeate and break up the soil during their life and enrich it in their decay, or for diverse reasons, it is certainly true that land--and especially _poor_ land--is enriched by growing upon it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens possibly excepted. So, should you ever have land that you cannot till to profit, whether because it is too poor, or because you have a sufficiency that is better, you should at once devote it to wood.