I took a run through Virginia last Summer, not far from the 1st of August. That State was then suffering intensely from drouth, as she continued to do for some weeks thereafter. I am quite sure that I saw on her thirsty plains and hillsides not less than three hundred thousand acres planted with Indian Corn, whereof the average product could not exceed ten bushels per acre, while most of it would fall far below that yield, and there were thousands of acres that would not produce one sound ear! Every one deplored the failure, correctly attributing it to the prevailing drouth. And yet, I passed hundreds if not thousands of places where a very moderate outlay would have sufficed to dam a stream or brooklet issuing from between two spurs of the Blue Ridge, or the Alleghenies, so that a refreshing current of the copious and fertilizing floods of Winter and Spring, warmed by the fervid suns of June and July, could have been led over broad fields lying below, so as to vanquish drouth and insure generous harvests. Nay; I feel confident that I could in many places have constructed rude works in a week, after that drouth began to be felt, that would have saved and made the Corn on at least a portion of the planted acres through which the now shrunken brooks danced and laughed idly down to the larger streams in the wider and equally thirsty valleys. Of course, I know that this would have been imperfect irrigation--a mere stop-gap--that the cold spring-water of a parched Summer cannot fertilize as the hill-wash of Winter and Spring, if thriftily garnered and warmed through and through for sultry weeks, would do; yet I believe that very many farmers might, even then, have secured partial crops by such irrigation as was still possible, had they, even at the eleventh hour, done their best to retrieve the errors of the past. For the present, I would only counsel every farmer to give his land a careful scrutiny with a view to irrigation in the future. No one is obliged to do any faster than his means will justify; and yet it may be well to have a clear comprehension of all that may ultimately be done to profit, even though much of it must long remain unattempted. In many cases, a stream may be dammed for the power which it will afford for two or three months of each year, if it shall appear that this use is quite consistent with its employment to irrigation, when the former alone would not justify the requisite outlay. It is by thus making one expense subserve two quite independent but not inconsistent purposes that success is attained in other pursuits; and so it may be in farming.