our purchase Mr. Harland came out to inspect the
premises, and of course he was delighted.

"This will make a new man of you," said he to me. "It will take your
mind off your impracticable star-gazing and moonshining, and divert
your attention into the channels of realism. These premises are so
spacious as to admit of your engaging to a considerable extent in
agriculture; you can now lay aside the telescope and the spectrum for
the spade and the hoe; the field of speculation can be abandoned for
this noble acre which I hope soon to see smiling into an abundant
harvest."

"Yes," said I, "it is my purpose to engage largely in the cultivation
of flowers."

"Pshaw!" cried Mr. Harland, "there you go again! Don't you know that
flowers are wholly worthless except in so far as they pander to the
gratification of a sensuous appetite? It would be a crime to surrender
these opportunities to ignoble uses. You must raise vegetables here,
or perhaps some of the small fruits would thrive better in this rich
sandy soil."

Investigation satisfied Mr. Harland that blackberries were _the_
particular kind of small fruit to which the soil seemed adapted. I was
not surprised at this, for I knew that the blackberry was a favorite
with Mr. Harland--in fact, Mr. Harland is the only author I know of who
has written a novel whose plot hinges (so to speak) upon a blackberry.
So passionately fond of this fruit is he that he devotes a part of the
year to cultivating blackberries on his Wisconsin farm. There are
invidious persons who intimate that his only reason for cultivating the
blackberry is to be found in the fact that nothing else will grow on
his farm, and presumably you have heard the epigram which the
romanticists have perpetrated at Mr. Harland's expense, and which
represents that ambitious and aggressive gentleman as raising
blackberries in summer and ---- in winter.

After getting me thoroughly inoculated with the blackberry idea, and
having duly impressed me with his theory that true manhood consisted of
making one's self unspeakably miserable and sweaty with a shovel and a
hoe, Mr. Harland broached his favorite topic, and ventured the
assertion that now that I was the possessor of taxable property I would
become as rabid a single-tax advocate as Henry George himself. I
answered that I already advocated a single-tax system, for the reason
that if we could only once get a single-tax system in vogue we should
then be but o