season, for "Polish farmers cannot work all der land dey wants to, because dey cannot get de help.”

Like many, he rated his barn higher than his house.

"I make fine farm, good barn," he said; "I no care 'bout house. I buy meinself fine cows, fine horses, fine pigs, fertilizer, raise onions and tobac'. What I care 'bout house?"

The desire for the pleasant house may come in the next generation of Thomases. With his neighbors the Jackenowskis it has come in this. As the priest passed by the latter's farm late at night he found them up on the roof shingling. "They work from starlight to starlight when they are paying for a farm," he told me, and they are still at it Saturday night, when the Yankee or Irishman is driving into town for a shave or a good time."

"What will your sons do?" I asked Thomas; he had three working with him. "Will you cut up the farm?"

Nein," he replied, with a confident smile; " dey will get farms of deir own; dey will all do much better dan I have. Ja!"

His sons spoke English without a trace of accent. This is typical of the Polish children in the country, who acquire the tongue, principally through the good public schools, as skillfully as they learn to weed onions.

Harry Briskow cares so much about his house that his farm has not developed with those of the Thomases. "Harry "is from Austria, and is considered an authority on the Polish-American farm, since he has been in this country over twenty years. His place, of only a few acres, is perched on the edge of Mount Warner, and his house partly explains why he has to rent land to grow tobacco. One would have praised it as an especially neat American farm-house, it was so white and tidy and clean-looking. The barn was a strong, rich red—not a board rotting for lack of paint. The yard was clean. Five children came out to see me, the third, about four years old, carrying the baby. Father and mother were up in the wood-lot loading logs for the winter.

Did your mother work out before she was married?" I asked the eldest. Many

an immigrant Polish girl goes out as servant for several years, putting nine out of every ten dollars of her wages in the savings bank, while her young man is working as a farm-hand; then the two join fortunes, take a farm on mortgage, have a houseful of children, and gradually shake the mortgage off their strong backs.

"No," explained eleven-year-old Susy (Americanized from Sofia), a pretty, slender blonde child, "my mother, she did not have to work out. She had been in this country only one week when the man where she was staying came and said to my father: Harry, very pretty girl over at my house; better come and see her.' And my father, he went right away, and called on my mother, and he looked at her, and said to himself, 'That girl's pretty enough to marry right off quick.' And so my father married my mother, and she did not have to work out before she was married."

"But did she work after ?"

Oh, yes, they had to pay for the farm, and she went out to work in the next house, and she left me to look after my brother-he was not one year old, and I not two and a half-and they put me in the cradle and told me to rock him to sleep, and we both lie in the cradle, and I rock it, and put him to sleep, and then I go to sleep too."

The boy was pale and thin, poor child, and the baby, eighteen months old, appeared sickly, dough-faced, and flabby, and when I asked what it ate, Susy said, with an air of surprise, "Why, everything!" Yet most of those who live are strong, and look like the survival of the fittest.

Molesky, from Russian Poland, is another man who has made over a farm that had gone to seed-weed seed. He lives in a large, old-fashioned New England house, in the stretch where the abandoned farms begin to lie between the cultivated-specters among the living. He has forty-three acres, and enough wood for his own use.

"I get money, I get rich some day," he said, grandly. "If I sell de farm, it is for much more moneys dan I pays for it. I meinself did everyt'ing. When I buy, no fences, rain come down on hayloft, no good roofs, no nutting; I build 'em all. Now what you t'ink of dis barn?" for all

of it was tight and workmanly. "And I have fine crops-onions, tobac', potatoes, corn, horses, cows, everyt'ing!" They are fond of enumerating their blessings, permitted by Providence, because earned by themselves.

Near Molesky were four new Polish farmers who had built as many small homes by their own labor under a carpenter foreman. They had bought land that was unused by its American owner because he had more than he knew what to do with," i. e., could farm profitably.

Not only the run-down farms made over and those cut as pieces from the old belong to the Poles, but many of the best in the Valley. Go where one will in the lowlands, one will find that, when possible, they will buy the most productive land, and are capable of working off a staggering mortgage.

The famous Cephas Graves farm, south of Sunderland, is an instance of this high aim, being known by every farmer for miles as the place that grew the prize tobacco for the World's Fair. When the owner died, I was told, his son decided that he could not pay off the mortgage without years of heartbreaking toil, and preferred to take up poorer and cheaper land to the east in Leverett. A Russian Pole took the place, paying $300 down and giving a mortgage for $7,500, borrowing from another Pole, who is not the only one of his race capable of lending that sum on good physical security, the moneylender having become thus well off through his own hard toil and frugality since leaving disheartening Europe.

A quarter of a mile below the recently purchased estate for the Amherst College Inn is the Berkley Smith farm of over fifty acres, with its handsome house facing on broad, elm-shaded South Pleasant Street, the farm and surroundings, even to its name, New England to the core. The property was still so attractive, even after its beautiful woods had been razed, that one of the professors was making anxious inquiries, when it was snapped up by some Rogerowskis. They paid a little cash and took out a $5,000 mortgage. In the second year their slaving over the onions netted them $2,000, and they can look cheerfully forward to the day of emancipation. For the Roger

owskis, like the Jackenowskis, have a farm-yard of children.

With their wages gone up to a point undreamed of a few years ago, not many remain farm-hands. The cost of living does not disquiet the Polish laborer, for he rejects the thought of luxuries and conveniences until he has secured his farm. He gets from $20 to $23 a month, with $14 more for food, because as yet few American farmers' wives will board him; he is welcome at one of the numerous boarding-houses of his people. Neither will he give his employer the twelve and fourteen hour day he used to, saving his excess strength until it tells in cash returns to himself—the Pole is wearing off his green.

Only near the manufacturing centers do the antiquated wages still survive. An assessor at Ludlow informed me that during the long and dramatic strike of the factory Poles there for a living wage it was the aim of the company to keep always from fifty to one hundred waiting for a job. These could be picked up by the farmers in this time of idleness for often merely their board. The assessor seemed amazed when he was told the wages paid up the Valley. In Ludlow itself, however, a number of Poles have become successful independent farmers, and three own good milk routes.

The opportunity for work all the year is so steady that even the migrating bachelor Pole is becoming a winter resident. Formerly, when the harvest season was over, an army of discharged hands would go down to the Pennsylvania coal mines, to return with the bluebirds in the spring. To-day most winter North and go into other work-tobacco-sorting in the big establishments in South Deerfield, wood-chopping, ice-cutting.

They are indisputably the great farm laboring class in the Connecticut Valley. "All our boys are crazy to get off to the city, and we can't stop them," explained a New England farmer, "and our girlsthey go to business college. Without the Poles we couldn't possibly run our farms, and they do certainly earn their wages."

When the Valley farmer closes terms with the Pole, he knows that the latter will keep his word, therein having the advantage of the too much envied Californian

rancher, who fears that his Japanese laborers may decamp in a body, leaving him helpless at fruit picking season, because he would not or could not go beyond the contracted wages, already high.

In some respects the Polish farmer and the Japanese are not unlike; both are successful onion raisers, each rents advantageously much land, and each race has here in America a large number of pros perous independent farmers.

As timber for American citizens, how ever, the two can only be contrasted. For the Pole is steady and faithful, is scrupulously honest about his debts, is just in business relations. The Pole is sexually much more moral than the Oriental; he is a Christian and monogamous, he can intermarry with the native stock, and has done so successfully. Above all, he wishes to become an American, he is making his home here, and his children's and his grandchildren's; he is like enough to us to raise no race problem. He has the essentials of good citizenship, and will not only be assimilated but will add fiber to the Nation.

The chief objection the New England ers make to the Poles is that their wedding and christening celebrations are a nuisance, for they sometimes last a week and are so lively that the neighbors have continuous insomnia. Liquor vanishes in regrettable quantities, and fighting often goes with it. The principals usually turn up in court next day.

In one Polish center the American judge, doing all he can to discourage such brawling, inflicts fines by this simple method:

"When I can't make head or tail of it, I fine the man who gave the celebration, also the person against whom the charge of assault is brought; then, to make sure, I fine the Pole who made the charge, and the guilty person is sure to get punished." It must be stated that, except for fighting among themselves on such festive occasions and for drunkenness, they have a notably clean court record. And many of the younger generation, and many of the better class, do not attend these merrymakings, which, anyway, are not so unlike the old-time conduct of the Irish when drowning their sorrow at a well-equipped wake.

In partial extenuation one young and well-educated Pole said, "In Poland they allow saloons only in the big places: here one can get all he wants anywhere, or bring it in." The agricultural Poles in the Valley come from the little places. "So," concluded Dominick, the Poles drink much more here than they do in Poland. Ja!”

Even so, “Many Polander drunks ?'" repeated the street car conductor. “Naw, they're not the ones that give us the trouble."

Their honesty is a byword. Merchant after merchant gave the same forcible reply the most honest people in the Valley.

"In all of the six years I've run this store," said an Amherst butcher and greengrocer, “I've had only one bad bill from the Polanders, and I do lots of business with them. And" (a coal, wood, and plumbing man), “who's been here ten years, was telling me the same thing, and, come to find out, it was the identical Polander who'd done us both. One thing about them," he reflected, "is they don't buy beyond what they know they can pay for."

"Do you take out a lien on the crop?" This was in a country store, an emporium for the Poles.

"No, sir; you can trust 'em," the Yankee clerk answered. Why, we run up bills from $250 to $350 with single Polanders; they'll always pay when they've cashed in their tobacco or their onions.

Hey, wait, and I'll help you," and he sped out to assist a Polish farmer who was starting off with six barrels of flour and two of sugar, bought on sure credit.

"How about the French Canadians?" I asked another dealer.

"The French!" and he laughed; "the worst debtors a store can have. Why, a business man from —was telling me that every time he saw a train pull out for the north he thought, Gee, there's some more of my debtors skipped to Canada !'"

Some years ago the onion crop failed for three successive seasons in Sunderland, and there was a temporary falling off of the Polish population, when many turned to the mines of Pennsylvania; the storekeepers and other creditors are still marveling, for every bill was paid up before the departure.

The Poles have mastered the growing of onions and tobacco, both great but difficult and treacherous crops; they have been successful with market gardening, with milk routes of their own—the more progressive "raising milk " for the creamery, the others for the daily train to Boston. There is no reason why they cannot continue their success by taking up other lines of agriculture. Perhaps they will win back for the New England apple its former rightful eminence, lost to the scientific and businesslike Northwest.

Without the Poles many once prosperous agricultural communities would have become senile. Those farming towns where they have entered which were falling in population and losing their youth to the city are growing in numbers and becoming young again. The towns where they have not yet come are still dwindling. The Poles are rushing the lines of the abandoned farm tracts backward which were creeping out into the Valley.

It was in such a section, at an oldfashioned "Corners," that I stopped.

"Do the people up here let their children play with the Polish children?" I inquired.

"Children?" the man said bitterly; "there aren't any American chlidren left here—just old folks; all the children are Polish."

Yes, across the street I found them working, and down the road were four more new families.

In the lower grades of the Sunderland schools the Polish outnumber all others. Some of the small rural schools that in the nature of things would have been closed are filled with chubby little Polish faces.

They are reaching back now, these vigorous newcomers, into the less fertile regions, and it is probably only a question of time before they will march up the steep hills into the real "back country," where the once blooming towns have gone to rot through the Westward movement, the railways isolating the hills, the fever for city life, and also because of the continual intermarriage of the same stock; where the house sites are filled with burdocks and young sumacs, and the once fruitful orchards are submerged with match timber and future railway ties.

It was in the very center of such a town, with the store and town hall and meeting-house standing about the little "green," that the wife of a selectman said to me, as she looked mournfully away from her doorstep over the advancing sea of second and third growth of woods below us-miles and miles of it:

"There aren't any young folks left anywhere near us now. We had some neighbors half a mile down the road, but they tried to pick so many quarrels that we were glad when they moved away. My daughter is the only young person anywhere round here."

66

Yes, it's terribly lonesome," added the daughter, "and the woods are full of cellar-holes.'

This half-deserted "cellar-hole" country will probably attract the second army of the Poles; for the neglected land is only a few dollars an acre, and full of possibilities, growing the finest of potatoes and some of it even tobacco, while the orchards only wait until the State will permit the elimination of the deer—a veritable pest-which ravage the young trees.

There is only one productive community down in the Valley that I have found where the New Englanders have preserved intact the old atmosphere, the local farmers combining to buy in any farm that comes on their market, to hold it until sold advantageously to one of their own race.

In another town the best that could be done by the more or less actual alliance against the Poles was to keep them off the southern end of "the street." The little hotel in the very center of the village is now rented out by a Pole to many Polish families.

"When the Poles offered you $150 an acre for land you'd reckoned as worth $100, why, people began to let go," said a resident of lovely old Sunderland; "then it went jumping up to $175 and $200, and then to $225 and $250, and now almost anybody sells, Polander or no Polander.

"And they're certainly helping the community," my informant went on. " Why, over there on the plains we used to say that the land was so poor it was only fit to hold the world together; the farms had all failed out, they had to shut up the school-house-there wasn't enough