All the scraps and leavings of their food,
plant waste from lumber work or textile industry, all the
solid matter from the sewage, properly treated and combined--
everything which came from the earth went back to it.
The practical result was like that in any healthy forest; an
increasingly valuable soil was being built, instead of the
progressive impoverishment so often seen in the rest of the world.
When this first burst upon us we made such approving comments
that they were surprised that such obvious common sense should be
praised; asked what our methods were; and we had some difficulty
in--well, in diverting them, by referring to the extent of our own
land, and the--admitted--carelessness with which we had skimmed
the cream of it.
At least we thought we had diverted them. Later I found that
besides keeping a careful and accurate account of all we told
them, they had a sort of skeleton chart, on which the things we
said and the things we palpably avoided saying were all set down
and studied.
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