From the mouth of each pit that forms one of the entrances to the several tunnels, crawls a long black pipe, twelve inches in diameter. As you stand above looking down, its great black length seems to cling to the steel-lined walls like a vast serpent. This is the pipe through which the noxious dynamite fumes are whiffed away. Following this pipe into the power house, one finds at its mouth a revolving fan driven by an engine. It is this fan that sucks the smoke away. And by the side of this ventilating pipe runs a tube of a smaller bore. Through it the throbbing engines force the compressed air that drives the air drills, or air guns, as the workmen call them. Far out over Lake Michigan, on the same supports as those of the trolley system, runs this tube, transmitting a power of ninety pounds pressure to the drill that churns and bites its way into the solid rock beneath the

waves.

This rock, shattered and splintered by the powerful explosives, is hurried shoreward. It is an old saying that Napoleon made war support itself, the booty he secured from a ravaged province enabling him to equip his forces for the next campaign. In like manner the engineers at work on this huge water system make use of the debris they wrench from the under-world. It is crushed and screened and then placed with cement in those rolling, weirdlyshaped machines called concrete mixers. This concrete, which so recently formed a part of the earth's interior once more finds a resting place in the old depths. Following in the track of the compressed air drill and the dynamite, come the men laying concrete. They line the great bore with the impervious substance. stone that is not used in this manner is screened and sold, and thus another source of revenue is derived for the cost of the work.

The

OR a product of Nature, a California navel orange as it graces the breakfast table or the pushcart is about the most artificial thing in the world. It is also a very striking illustration of the fact that while beauty may be only skin-deep, it counts for a whole lot. To begin with, the navel orange of California is an exotic, reaching its present habitat after devious wandering. And be it ever so sweet-tasting, if its skin has had its beauty marred it scarcely ever gets beyond the orchard where it grew. Not only that, but even the most comely ones, before they are boxed and

shipped are brushed by machinery and polished and otherwise fussed with to give them a beauty which mere nature never would have provided.

Science and machinery have been busy with the navel orange ever since it came to California, and the result has been very striking. Fifteen years ago there were only some 1,250,000 boxes of oranges shipped a year from the state; now there are about 12,000,000 boxes, and their value is upwards of $20,000,000 annually. To their cultivation 75,000 acres in the southern part of the state are devoted, representing an investment of about $125,000,000, and there are said to be more than 6,000,000 trees in process of growth in the various orchards.

Labor saving devices have been applied to the handling, polishing, grading and packing of oranges, and a system of cooperative direction in their marketing, till now the average cost to the grower for both packing and marketing is 35 cents a box, as compared with 50 cents to 75 cents a few years ago.

The story of the Southern California orange industry begins, logically, in 1872,

Glenwood Hotel, where it was transplanted with much ceremony, President Roosevelt being present, in 1903. This tree still bears fruit-and as orange trees live to be hundreds of years old there is no reason why it should not go on bearing for many generations and every now and then the White House receives a shipment from it.

From the tree which Mrs. Tibbetts planted sprang the twenty-million-dollar-ayear industry. As the oranges it bore were seedless, propagation had to be by budding, and for a while the thrifty woman from Maine got a dollar a bud for all she sold. Later the price fell to five dollars for a dozen buds. In 1880 the navel orange crop was one box!

when an observant United States consul, at Bahia, Brazil, sent to Washington a few samples of seedless oranges growing wild in the swamps of the Amazon. A year later Mrs. Eliza Tibbetts, a Maine woman, got a few shrubs, and taking them to California, planted them on some fand which her husband had bought at Riverside. Two of the shrubs died, but the third grew to be a tree. You can see it now, surrounded by a wire fence and honored by a tablet, in the court of the

Los Angeles is the shipping center for California oranges, and shipments are made every month of the year. From November to June, however, constitutes the real shipping season, only a small quantity of blood and Valencia oranges being shipped during the summer months. In November the navels, not yet at their best, are rushed East for the Christmas market, and the flood of this seedless variety keeps up all win

ter.

There are no off-seasons for the orange tree. It is a steady worker, and bears fruit with unvarying regularity. But it insists that the orange grower be a steady worker also. Constantly there are irrigating ditches to be dug or attended to, wind-breaks of eucalyptus trees or cypress to be provided, the ground to be cultivated and fertilized, and pests, especially the scale, to be fought.

Irrigation is in most cases accomplished by the furrow system, the water

being supplied from artesian wells. The water is brought to the borders of the groves in pipes, or small canals, and from there is let in among the trees during the dry season.

The irrigating plants are usually under public ownership and are managed by officials elected for the purpose by the growers. These officials notify each individual grower just when his turn to have water comes, and how long he can draw from the supply. The tax for this irrigation amounts to about five dollars an acre for the year.

Two methods are employed to fight the pests which attack the orange trees. A distillate, composed of a preparation of crude oil, is sprayed on them at regular intervals, in the case of minor pests. The red scale, however, can be exterminated only by fumigation, which is accomplished by covering over each tree with a tent-like canvas, under which a vapor of cyanide of potassium or sulphuric acid is set free.

The spraying is usually done by contract, by men who go about among the various orchards with spraying apparatus. The charge for this is about ten dollars an acre for a year.

For fertilization, it has been found that different species of the leguminous family, grown between the rows of trees and plowed under, are both cheaper and better than the ordinary manures. For these "cover crops," as they are called, the field pea is principally used, but experiments are now being made with the cow pea and with several varieties of vetch. Some of these have long, deep, stringy roots, which serve as a sort of subsidiary irrigating system, letting down the water and air into the soil, and also gathering from the atmosphere free nitrogen through the working of the soil bacteria.

Picking the oranges from the trees is now about all that is not done with the aid of machinery, after the fruit is ripe.

THE STABLES CF THE ORANCE GROWER.

sun comes out to dry the oranges, for damp collects the dust, which cuts the skin and spoils the appearance of the fruit.

The pickers are armed with bottomless bags you can see them in one of the illustrations-into which the oranges are dropped as gathered from the trees. The under ends of the bags are merely gathered up on the sides by hooks and can be dropped instantaneously, allowing the quick emptying of the oranges into the boxes. A specially expert picker can make two dollars and fifty cents a day, the pay being at the rate of two and onehalf cents a box. A good average, however, is eighty boxes to a day's work, or two dollars.

After the oranges are picked and taken in wagon loads to the packing houses they lose their identity. They are no longer Mr. So-and-So's oranges, but oranges from such-and-such a district. and are arranged according to size and

the fruit if they were immediately packed. During this period of wilting, the skin of the orange draws considerably closer to the pulp.

After the wilting, the oranges are dumped into a long tank filled with water, at one end of which there is a large wheel having a tire of soft bristles. This wheel as it turns works in conjunction with another set of brushes in a smaller tank underneath, which brighten and clean the oranges. This appliance is the mechanical successor of the woman with brush and tub who formerly did a similar

ing cylindrical brushes. This process gives a still sleeker glow to the blushing cheek of the orange, and in this condition of polished beauty they are carried in a belt elevator to a sorting table.

The orange sorter is an expert as wonderful as a tea taster. As the experienced taster of teas can detect the most delicate gradations of flavor in the leaf, so the man whose business it is to assort the oranges as they pass before him in what seems to the ordinary person a continuous yellow blur, can stand all day and deflect to their proper channels the