And is there any form of piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain--the treasuries of Pomona and Vertumnus?
Such treasuries, in the markets of this world, are worth only a modest so-much-a-bushel, yet I think I should actually feel myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money.
From a corn-growing country, we were evidently passing into a country whose beautiful business was apples.

Orchards began more or less to line the road, and wagons with those same apple-barrels became a feature of the highway.
Another of its features was the number of old ruined farmhouses we came on, standing side by side with the new, more ambitious homesteads.

We seldom came on a prosperous-looking house but a few yards away was to be seen its aged and abandoned parent, smothered up with bushes, roof fallen in, timbers ready to collapse, the deserted hearth choked with debris and overgrown with weeds--the very picture of a haunted house.

Here had been the original home, always small, seldom more than four rooms, and when things had begun to prosper, a more spacious, and often, to our eyes, a less attractive, structure had been built, and the old home left to the bats and owls, with a complete abandonment that seemed to us--sentimental travellers as we were--as cynical as it was curiously wasteful.
Putting sentiment out of the question, we had to leave unexplained why the American farmer should thus allow so much good building material to go to waste.

Besides, as we also noted much farm machinery rusting unhoused in the grass, we wondered why he did not make use of these old buildings for storage purposes.