COUNTRY LIFE
THE later harvests are proving most beneficently abundant, and the dry, warm weather befell at the chosen moment. The sun was just in time to add a good percentage of sugar to the sugar beet, which is a more perfect machine perhaps than any other plant for performing the most vital of all miracles, which we conceal under the syllables of photosynthesis. The abundant leaves so gather and cook the sunlight that the dull, fat- looking root may contain over 20 per cent. of sugar. The potatoes were as successful starch-makers. When I walked across a field that had yielded eight or nine tons to the acre, the relics that too careless school- children had left would have added a great many hundredweight, both of King Edwards and Majesties. Why shouldn't" gleaners glean the potato as well as the wheat fields? These same schoolchildren freely used the popular name for an unusually large tuber (one of which weighed 3. lbs.). It was always an oven-buster. Mr. Pearsall Smith and others ma' well assert the superiority of the vernacular over the literary language. It is racier, though not always prettier. A large sweet is usually a gob-stopper.
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