horse and cow
And you will drive the wagon
While I drive the plow,"

is very pretty. The horse and the pigs are practical, if you can
take care of them yourself; pigs are good farm catch-alls. If you
have to pay a man to do it, you had better hire your horses and buy
your pork.

Two well-groomed, healthy cows, one calving in the spring and one in
the autumn, can be made a source of profit, and of valuable manure,
if you have land enough in a neighborhood where up-to-date parents
are willing to pay ten to twenty cents a quart for pure milk for
their infants or even for family use. But your land and your own
baby's care and milk will probably be enough for you to attend to
promptly and thoroughly every day--and night.

It is an age-old experience that if we take care of a little land,
the land will take care of us. In Ferrero's "Grandezza e Decadenza
di Roma" is an interesting account of Marcus Terentius Varro's "De
Re Rustica." Varro wrote in the year 37 B.C., and as he was then
eighty years old, he had seen the transformation of Italy from an
agricultural to a manufacturing, trading community and the
accompanying wreck of the old agricultural system, which, of course,
he laments.

The growth of vast landed estates largely held by imperial
favorites, as Pliny said, destroyed Italy. So fearful has the
destruction been that it is only in our generation that the Campagna
at Rome, which was once an intensely fruitful quilt of garden
patches, has been reclaimed from the fever-smitten swamp to which
vast landlordism had reduced it.

In the third book of "De Re Rustica," Varro recommends as his
remedy, intensive cultivation close to the cities, and the breeding
of "fancy stock," including pigeons' snails, peacocks, deer, and
wild boars.

He tells how an aunt of his made 60,000 sesterces ($3000) in one
year by raising thrushes for the Roman market, at a time when an
excellent farm of about 200 acres only yielded 30,000 sesterces per
annum. He quotes another case of one who made 40,000 sesterces per
annum from a flock of one hundred peacocks, by selling the eggs and
the young. Those old Roman women weren't so slow.

Ferraro calls Varro's work one of the most important for the history
of ancient Italy and says historians have made a mistake in not
reading it.

At the time of the migration of the barbarians (350 to 750 A.D.),
the lot of each able-bodied man was about thirty morgen (equal to
twenty acres) on averag