The Breton villages are composed of
mere hovels, where pigs, cows, and poultry live in close proximity to
their owners, a dung-hill stands before every front door, and, to get
indoors and out, you have always to cross a pool of liquid manure. Here
order and cleanliness prevail, with a diffusion of well-being, hardly, I
should say, to be matched out of America.
Travellers who visit France again and again, as much out of sympathy
with its people's institutions as from a desire to see its monuments and
outward features, will find ample to reward them in Seine et Marne. On
every side we have evidence of the tremendous natural resources and
indefatigable laboriousness of the people. There is one point here, as
elsewhere in France, which strikes an agriculturist with astonishment,
and that is the abundance of trees standing amid cornfields and
miscellaneous crops, also the interminable plantation of poplars that
can be seen on every side, apparently without any object. But the truth
is, the planting of apple and pear trees in fields is no extravagance,
rather an economy, the fruit they produce exceeding in value the corn
they damage, whilst the puzzling line of poplars growing beside canals
and rivers is the work of the Government, every spare bit of ground
belonging to the State being planted with them for the sake of the
timber.
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