usand persons. In
California the Italian owns farms, orchards, vineyards, market
gardens, and even ranches. Here he finds the cloudless sky and mild
air of his native land. The sunny slopes invite vine culture.

In the North and the East the alert Italian has found many
opportunities to buy land. In the environs of nearly every city
northward from Norfolk, Virginia, are to be found his truck patches.
At Vineland and Hammonton, New Jersey, large colonies have flourished
for many years. In New York and Pennsylvania, many a hill farm that
was too rocky for its Yankee owner, and many a back-breaking clay
moraine in Ohio and Indiana has been purchased for a small cash
payment and, under the stimulus of the family's coaxing, now yields
paying crops, while the father himself also earns a daily wage in the
neighboring town. Where one such Italian family is to be found, there
are sure to be found at least two or three others in the neighborhood,
for the Italians hate isolation more than hunger. Often they are
clustered in colonies, as at Genoa and Cumberland in Wisconsin, where
most of them are railroad workmen paying for the land out of their
wages.

The Slavs, too, wedge into the most surprising spaces. Their colonies
and settlements are to be found in considerable numbers in every part
of the Union except the far South. They are on the cut-over timber
lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, usually engaged in
dairying or raising vegetables for canning. On the great prairies in
Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the Bohemians and the Poles
have learned to raise wheat and corn, and in Texas, Oklahoma, and
Arkansas, they have shown themselves skillful in cotton raising.
Wherever fruit is grown on the Pacific slope, there are Bohemians,
Slavonians, and Dalmatians. In New England, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana,
and Maryland, the Poles have become pioneers in the neglected corners
of the land. For instance in Orange County, New York, a thriving
settlement from old Poland now flourishes where a quarter of a century
ago there was only a mosquito breeding swamp. The drained area
produces the most surprising crops of onions, lettuce, and celery.
Many of these immigrants own their little farms. Others work on shares
in anticipation of ownership, and still others labor merely for the
season, transients who spend the winter either in American factories
or flit back to their native land.

In Pennsylvania it is the mining towns whi