Incomes In Country and Town

1895

Five thousand dollars in a country town is affluence if the beneficiary is content to stay there, but in a city the family man with only that income, provided he is ambitious, can only just live and might fairly be described as the cousin-german to a mendicant, and yet there are some worthy citizens still who would doubtless be aghast at these statements and would wish to know how one is to spend $6,000 a year without extravagance. — Scribner's Monthly.

Note: "cousin-german" means first cousin, here the sense being "the next thing" or "essentially."


Death Valley

Death valley, in southern California, was formerly a lake of mineral water, and its dried up bed is now covered with a crust of salt, soda and borax to a depth of from six inches to three feet.