many are the ways that are opening for this movement.  Transportation companies are responsible for a number of colonies planted bodily in cut-over timber regions of the South.  The journals and the real estate agents of the different races are always alert to spy out opportunities.  Dealing in second-hand farms has become a considerable industry.  The advertising columns of Chicago papers announce hundreds of farms for sale in northern Michigan and Wisconsin.  In all the older States there are for sale thousands of acres of tillable land which have been left by the restless shiftings of the American population.  In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution.  Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which neglect has woven about them.  One can see paralysis creeping over them as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender one by one the little industries that gave them life.  These are the opportunities of the immigrant peasant.  Wherever the new migration swarms, there the receding tide leaves a few energetic individuals who have made for themselves a permanent home.  In the wake of construction gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these immigrant families taking root in the soil.  In the smaller cities, an immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus for a gathering of his kind.  The market gardens that surround the large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an unerring instinct for weeds.  Now and then a family finds a forgotten acre, builds a shack, and starts a small independent market garden.  Within a few years a whole settlement of shacks grows up around it, and soon the trucking of the neighborhood is in foreign hands.  Seasonal agricultural work often carries the immigrant into distant canning centers, hop fields, cranberry marshes, orchards, and vineyards.  Every time a migration of this sort occurs, some settlers remain on land previously thought unfit for cultivation—­perhaps a swamp which they drain or a sand-hill which they fertilize and nurture into surprising fertility by constant toil.  This racial seepage is confined almost wholly to the Italian and the Slav.

There is a vast acreage of unoccupied good land in the South, which the negro, usually satisfied with a bare living, has neither the enterprise nor the thrift to cultivate.  The prejudice of the former slave owner against the foreign immigration for many years retarded the development of this land.  About 1880, however, groups of Italians, attracted by the sunny climate and the opportunities for making a livelihood, began to seep into Louisiana.  By 1900 they numbered over seventeen thousand.  When direct sailings between the Mediterranean and the