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Prune-orchards, the trees weighed down with fruit yet green, clothe the hill-sides with their luxuriance; indeed, the whole broad, rich valley of the Danube seems nodding and smiling in the consciousness of overflowing plenty; for days we have traversed roads leading through vineyards and orchards, and broad areas with promising-looking grain-crops.
The predominance is most marked in summer; in the winter, the easterly winds are almost as frequent as the westerly upon the continent, which is not true of the British isles. Sometimes, however, the south-westerly winds, which bring our genial April showers, continue to arrive with their watery burden until late in the summer, to the detriment or destruction of grain-crops; and yet this same wind, losing its excessive moisture as it sweeps onward over the continent, is highly favourable to the husbandman in Southern Russia.
By a report of the ordnance-captain, Larcom, it appeared there were grain-crops more than sufficient to support the whole population a cereal harvest estimated at four hundred millions of dollars, as prices were.
They attempted to follow the times and the manners of England; but here they were in the Antipodes, where everything was exactly opposite to English conditions. There were no natural grain-crops; there were practically no food-animals good to eat. Even so it was in very limited supply. The early settlers ate kangaroo flesh gladly, but they were not able to get enough of it to keep them in meat.
They are pleasant tokens of free-labor genius. No land tilled by slaves could produce them. I saw many large and highly-cultivated farms on these last miles of my walk. The country was proportionately divided between food and fuel. Oats and barley constitute the grain-crops.
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