of the climate most congenial to them, but this is a work wherein success is likely to cost more than its worth. Try it first on a small scale, if you will try it; and be sure you do it thoroughly. XXVIII. GRAIN-GROWING--EAST AND WEST. I disclaim all pretensions to ability to teach Western farmers how to grow Indian Corn abundantly and profitably, while I cheerfully admit that they have taught _me_ somewhat thoroughly worth knowing. In my boyhood, I hoed Corn diligently for weeks at a time, drawing the earth from between the rows up about the stalks to a depth of three or four inches; thus forming hills which the West has since taught me to be of no use, but rather a detriment, embarrassing the efforts of the growing, hungry plants to throw out their roots extensively in every direction, and subjecting them to needless injury from drouth. I am thoroughly convinced that Corn, properly planted, will, like Wheat and all other grains, root itself just deep enough in the ground, and that to keep down all weeds and leave the surface of the corn-field open, mellow and perfectly flat, is the best as well as the cheapest way to cultivate Corn. And I do not believe that so much human food, with so little labor, is produced elsewhere on earth as in the spacious fields of Wheat and Corn in our grand Mississippi valley. And yet I have seen in that valley many ample stretches covered with Corn, whereof the tillage seemed susceptible of improvement. Riding between these great corn-fields in October, after everything standing thereon had been killed by frost, it seemed to my observation that, while the corn-crop was fair, the weed-crop was far more luxuriant; so that, if everything had been cut clean from the ground, and the corn and the weeds placed in opposite scales, the latter would have weighed down the former. I cannot doubt that the cultivation, or lack of cultivation, which produces or permits such results, is not merely slovenly, but unthrifty.