The Newberry Herald

We rode one day last week with Mr. Coppock to Mr. Clint Bishop's to help him to away with some of his big watermelons. His melons are noted as being the finest in the County. After paying our respects to this luscious fruit, we walked over his farm to look at his cotton and corn. His cotton is very good; has been worked well, and is clean and well fruited. His corn is a perfect fine. When he bought the place two years ago there was a creek bottom of ten or fifteen acres on it that was covered with rank weeds and briars. The creek was shallow, and every rain overflowed the banks. Most persons would have regarded the bottoms as not worth the trouble of reclaiming. Not so he; for he at once set to work clearing it off, and dug a big ditch for the creek, besides several smaller ditches for drains. When he began to cut away the briar thickets an old darky said, "Mr. Bishop, for God's sake, don't; you're breaking up de Helena niggers' smoke-house." The bottoms are in corn this year, and it is the finest we ever saw. Some of them will yield as much as fifty bushels to the acre, and the average yield will not be much, if any, less than forty.

Mr. B. is showing what energy and work can do on a small farm.