to competition by open tender. The essential
requirements are: a central situation well
provided with railways, a suitable site of dry or
drainable grass-land for the show, special
railway accommodation in sidings provided for
the occasion, and a subscription towards
expenses and local prizes, which has for the last
seven years been never under £1200., and
sometimes exceeded £3000.

Hot is the rivalry of these occasions for the
honour and glory and profit of receiving the
agricultural notabilities, who bring in their
train thousands of visitors, who spend their
money for the benefit of the favoured citizens.
To this end great peers take the chair, great
merchants and manufacturers display their
liberality in the local subscription-list, and mayors
of an agricultural town exhibit a degree of local
patriotism which is not often thrown away.
Deputations, headed by county and borough M.P.s,
make pilgrimages to Hanover-square, and humbly
invite the council to accept their money. The
rival candidates for the favours of 1861 were
Doncaster and Leeds. Doncaster urged its
position in the midst of a splendid agricultural
district, with its miles of railway platform, specially
provided to accommodate the vast army of St.
Leger visitors, with its long list of hotels and
lodgings, trained to accommodate multitudes by
its race-course demands; and offered subscriptions
far from despicable. But Leeds could
combine the strength of manufactures with agriculture.
The men who made the cloth as well as
those who grew the wool, great landlords, great
farmers, and great manufacturers, could offer, if
not luxurious hotels, such a town-hall as
England cannot match, with a mayor ready to fill it
with guests—a mayor who in the annals of
the Royal Society will take rank with those
shining lights of zeal and hospitality, the
mayors of Salisbury and Chester, described by an
eminent implement maker and horseman as worthy
of the first prize as "the best mayors (mares)
for agricultural purposes." So Leeds won the
day, and provided twenty-six acres of land for the
show, about two hundred and fifty for the trials,
with branch railways for the machinery from
the railway to the show-yard, and a fair share
of private hospitality.

It must be confessed that there is a great
family likeness in these agricultural shows; that
the man who takes no special interest in live
stock or machinery, who has no friends amongst
that miscellaneous body the agricultural interest,
and takes no parlicularpleasure in gazing on
thousands of happy-looking country folks of all the
classes, from the smock-frocked with his
sweetheart to the squire with his thorough-bred
family in pork-pies and knickerbockers, one show
would be enough. But, fortunately, there is
everywhere a large tribe of people easily amused,
ready to take up a new study or a new hobby.

According to the usual precedent, the main
streets and entrances to the town honoured by
one of these agricultural encampments, are
adorned with triumphal arches of laurel, holly,
or even asparagus-leaves, bearing mottoes of the
old-fashioned flavour: "Speed the Plough;"
"Live and Let Live;" "God save the Queen;"
"Welcome to the R. A. S.," &c. Flags and
banners of forgotten elections are hung out from
windows and unite opposite houses, much to the
discomfiture of colts and heifers of a retiring
disposition, whilst houses of entertainment make
an immense display of royal standards and union
jacks, and gorgeous placards in blue, red, and
gold, addressed to the hungry and thirsty.
At Salisbury the good people went further, and
planted full-grown trees in the pretty square
which forms the market-place of that pleasant
central, clean-looking city, and for the time
produced, with their Roman town-hall, a scene that
carried one's recollection to the Boulevards and
Places on the other side of the Channel, without
the continental swells.

But great cities like Leeds do not
condescend to such adornments; deep in real
business, they are not excited like such deserted
towns as Chelmsford, or Norwich, or Salisbury,
or Canterbury. Mail-coaches and railroads have
not robbed the dwellers on the Aire and the
Calder of their great and prosperous dignity,
nor of their ancient position as the metropolis of
the Riding, and left them for two hundred and
fifty days in the year silent and dreary.

The first business of a Royal Agricultural
Show is the trial of implements and machinery
for prizes. The trials of field implements take
place before the show opens to the public, in
fields provided and often cropped specially for
the purpose. They cost a great deal of money,
and to the judges a great deal of time and
trouble. They are seldom seen by any
considerable number of persons unless it be on the
occasion of some extraordinary novelty, like
steam cultivation. They seldom prove anything,
and not being carried on at the right season
or for sufficient time, they owe their principal
interest to the reports of the newspaper press.
The real interest of the show commences on the
day when the live-stock judges, having made
their awards the previous day, and the select
five-shilling folks having had their rounds, the
turnstiles are unlocked, and the week
commences in earnest with the first half-crown
day. The day at five shillings only admits a few
hundred earnest purchasers in haste to get
home, and a few of the upper ten thousand, to
whom crowns are of no account.

The road to the show-yard, no matter where,
is like the road to a fair or a race-course—alive
with highly painted booths, wonderful pictures,
cracked music, voluble cheap Johns, three
throws for a penny, and Ethiopian singers. Tne
show-yard in the course of twenty years has
grown, in spite of attempts to weed out non-
agricultural articles, to an enclosure of five or
six-and-twenty acres. It is generally pitched
in a picturesque situation, within sight of a railway.
At Salisbury it lay under and between
the chalk walls of Old Sarum and the famous
cathedral, on a gorge of the downs that roll
right away to iStonehenge. At Chester it
stood on the Roodee—sacred to Mercury, the