nowing whether he should ever see them back again.
To-day every one of his farms is let for a thousand francs. His tenants
have thriven so well that each of them owns at least a hundred acres,
three hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten oxen, and five horses, and employs
more than twenty persons.

"But to resume. Our farms were ready by the end of the fourth year. Our
wheat harvest seemed miraculous to the people in the district, heavy as
the first crop off the land ought to be. How often during that year
I trembled for the success of my work! Rain or drought might spoil
everything by diminishing the belief in me that was already felt. When
we began to grow wheat, it necessitated the mill that you have seen,
which brings me in about five hundred francs a year. So the peasants say
that 'there is luck about me' (that is the way they put it), and believe
in me as they believe in their relics. These new undertakings--the
farms, the mill, the plantations, and the roads--have given employment
to all the various kinds of workers whom I had called in. Although the
buildings fully represent the value of the sixty thousand francs
of capital, which we sunk in the district, the outlay was more
than returned to us by the profits on the sales which the consumers
occasioned. I never ceased my efforts to put vigor into this industrial
life which was just beginning. A nurseryman took my advice and came
to settle in the place, and I preached wholesome doctrine to the poor
concerning the planting of fruit trees, in order that some day they
should obtain a monopoly of the sale of fruit in Grenoble.

"'You take your cheeses there as it is,' I used to tell them, 'why not
take poultry, eggs, vegetables, game, hay and straw, and so forth?' All
my counsels were a source of fortune; it was a question of who should
follow them first. A number of little businesses were started; they went
on at first but slowly, but from day to day their progress became more
rapid; and now sixty carts full of the various products of the district
set out every Monday for Grenoble, and there is more buckwheat grown for
poultry food than they used to sow for human consumption. The trade in
timber grew to be so considerable that it was subdivided, and since
the fourth year of our industrial era, we have had dealers in firewood,
squared timber, planks, bark, and later on, in charcoal. In the end four
new sawmills were set up, to turn out the planks and beams of timber.

"Wh