thing,
but good spaces between.

This will be the making of the world. Talk about fairs? If he fails
to get every prize he must pay a fine for every one that goes to
anybody else.

How we'll live! I can live on these things and nothing else. But
(just to match this home outfit) I'll order tea from Japan, ripe
olives from California, grape fruit and oranges from Florida. Then
poor folks will hang around, hoping to be invited to dinner!

Plant a few fig trees now; and pecans? Any good?

The world is going to come pretty close to starvation not only
during the war but for five or perhaps ten years afterward. An acre
or two _done right_--divinely right--will save us. An acre or two
on my land in Moore County--no king can live half so well if the
ground be got ready this spring and such a start made as one
natural-born gardener can make. The old Russian I had in Garden
City was no slouch. Do you remember his little patch back of the
house? That far, far, far excelled anything in all Europe. And
you'll recall that we jarred 'em and had good things all winter.

This St. Ives is the finest spot in England that I've ever seen.
To-day has been as good as any March day you ever had in North
Carolina--a fine air, clear sunshine, a beautiful sea--looking out
toward the United States; and this country grows--the best golf
links that I've ever seen in the world, and nothing else worth
speaking of but--tin. Tin mines are all about here. Tin and golf
are good crops in their way, but they don't feed the belly of man.
As matters stand the only people that have fit things to eat now in
all Europe are the American troops in France, and their food comes
out of tins chiefly. Ach! Heaven! In these islands man is
amphibious and carnivorous. It rains every day and meat, meat,
meat is the only human idea of food. God bless us, one acre of the
Sandhills is worth a vast estate of tin mines and golf links to
feed the innards of

Yours affectionately,

W.H.P.

P.S. And cornfield peas, of just the right rankness, cooked with
just the right dryness.

When I become a citizen of the Sandhills I propose to induce some
benevolent lover of good food to give substantial prizes to the
best grower of each of these things and to the best cook of each
a