Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/436

Rh high intelligence and indomitable spirit, whose immense farm joins his son's, with his own hands cut down the first tree in the swamp, which marked the beginning of this estate. He and his son, Capt. John G. Wallace, have now, in the first order of cultivation, many thousand acres of land not inferior to the best on the continent.

We were awakened in the morning by a chorus of bird song rivalling that of the evening before. On looking from our window we saw a field like a dream—1100 level acres without a fence—in which it appeared that not one inch was left neglected or unproductive. The splendid area of fertility was marked in squares of varying color like a map; here the rich dark brown of ploughed loam; there the green ridges of early potatoes and corn; yonder a long stretch of clover, and so on until every foot of the fine field was filled with natural wealth.

This field, called the Dover Farm, lies on the west side of the canal; that is, it reaches into the very depths of the swamp for nearly a mile and a half. Its position is between the lake and the canal.

How, then, if Lake Drummond and the canal be higher than the swamp, could this 1100 acres of land be drained? The answer has in it the