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understood why it was not adopted in this country.  The French scheduled definite times for two or three servings of each meal.  For example lunch might be served at 11:30, 12:30 and 1:30.  Tickets were printed for each serving, just enough to fill the diner.  Before the meal a waiter went through the entire train distributing tickets.  You took a ticket for whatever serving you chose.  If you went to the diner at the scheduled time you would be seated immediately on presenting your ticket, and served promptly.  You were however required to finish your meal and clear out before the next serving was due.  Only those who came to the last serving were allowed to linger beyond the hour.

What I most admired about the French was that they were a nation of conservationists.  They wanted to leave France as fit to live in as they had found it.  Conservation had been working well in France until World War 1 because their population had become stabilized, They were the only nation in Europe, perhaps in the world, to enjoy zero population growth.I don't mean to imply that the average French couple practised birth control for patriotic reasons.  Their motives may have been more selfish, but in any case the effect was salutary.  No doubt the German or Italian farmer wanted conservation too.  But they also wanted and had big families.  Conservation becomes hopeless in a country where the population keeps increasing indefinitely.

The landscape around Saumur showed at once that the French took better care of their land than Americans did.  I knew that the area had been settled and cultivated when Julius Caesar marched into Gaul, two thousand years before.  Yet the soil was still fertile and there was a surprising amount of woodland.  By contrast, my native Tennessee had been occupied by white men for only a little more than a century.  The prospect was that another hundred years would find Tennessee looking like the Bad Lands of South Dakota.

American farmers, especially in the south, still followed the practice of their pioneer ancestors.  Ground once cleared of forest would be planted year after year in corn, cotton or tobacco until the soil was exhausted.  They simply abandoned such a field, cleared a new one and repeated the process.  Until the early 1900's there had always been land to spare.  My home county was sprinkled heavily with fields which no