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Show Chinese Farmers j Irv Greater New York. There is one kind of farm in New York that is not at all common, that has never existed in any other city, so far as I know, in ancient or modern mod-ern times. It ' Is situated, oddly enough, in about the center of the 317 square miles of New York so well as the center of a boat-shaped area can be located. Cross Thirty-fourth street ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe; take the car marked "Steinway," and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, un-painted un-painted manufactories, squalid tenements, tene-ments, dirty back yards, and sad vacant va-cant lots that serve as the last resting place for decayed trucks and overworked over-worked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down wind-mill, which looks like an historic old relic, on a hilltop, but which was built in 1867 and tumbled down only last year, the Steinway Silk Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, low wings of the building covered with windows like a hot-house). Leave the car here and strike off to the left down a lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers who eani-tieirilying by tilling the soil of Greater New York. " At short distances a-e the other huts crouching at the foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out In front to dry, and large unusual crocks lying about and huge baskets and mattings all clearly from China;, they are as different from what could be bought on the neighboring avenues as the farms and farmers themselves are different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields, which are tilled in the oriental way, utilizing every Inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular intervals, in-tervals, like rice fields, the farmers themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked under their straw hats, while the western world wags on in Its own way all around them. This Is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade ground of the Waldorf-Astoria. Jesse Lynch Williams in Scribner's. |