about me, and you will write to me. That you
will, like a good kind girl. And you will tell
me how she speaks of me, and what she thinks
of that great baronet, Sir Archie Munro. You
will promise to do this?"

"I will do it if I can," said Hester,
doubtfully.

"That means that you will do it. And look
here," said Pierce Humphrey, "if she seerns at
all to listen to you, you must give her back
this ring; it is her own, which I gave her once,
and which she returned to me in a letter. You
must tell her that I sent it to her; and if that
does not touch her heart," said foolish Pierce,
with a great sigh, " I am sure I know of
nothing else that will."

After some doubts and difficulties, half
expressed, but strongly felt, Hester was simple
enough to consent to take the ring. And soon
after this she returned to the Mother Augustine;
and then there arose the question of how
to ship her off to Ireland.

FARM AND COLLEGE.

THAT part of the holding of a farmer or
landowner which pays best for cultivation is the
small estate within the ring fence of his skull.
Let him begin with the right tillage of his
brains, and it shall be well with his grains,
roots, herbage and forage, sheep and cattle; they
shall thrive and he shall thrive. " Practice
with science" is now the adopted motto of
the Royal Agricultural Society. Amateur
farming by men whose real business lies in
other trades, and who, without any true
scientific training, play with a few of the
results of science, cannot pay and never ought
to pay. The farmer's occupation is the oldest,
the most necessary, and, when rightly pursued,
one of the worthiest a man can follow. Of
late years it has risen to the dignity of a
liberal profession, and the young Englishman
may go through part of his special training
for it in a well appointed college.

This is the Royal Agricultural College at
Cirencester. After fighting an uphill fight for
twenty years, it stands now upon higher
ground than any other institution of its kind.
There is, indeed, no other of its kind in
England; but of institutions for the practical
and scientific training of the farmer out of
England; among the agricultural academies in
France, Germany, and elsewhere; not one, we
believe, is at the same time satisfactory and
self supporting. The Imperial Model Farm
and School of Agriculture at Grignon, founded
in 1826, and the chief of several established
by Louis Philippe, receives subvention from
the State, and the pupils upon its one thousand
two hundred acres are under highly qualified
teachers paid by the French Government. The
German academies and experimental stations
are also endowed by their governments. In
Ireland, again, our own Government has founded
agricultural schools. An unendowed agricultural
school, founded in 1821 at Bannow, Wexford,
only lived seven years. But since that time the
Commissioners of National Education have made
agricultural training schools part of their system.
The chief of these training schools is at
Glasnevin, where there are also thirty acres of botanic
garden; and a year ago the Museum of Irish
Industry was reconstructed and opened on a
seven years' probation as a Government school
of science with a department of agriculture.
Our English college, founded six and twenty
years since, not by Government, but by
working farmers, when a fashion had come
up for recognising the new need of scientific
training to their business, has not received
one farthing of public money. It had to find
its own way in the world, and paid so heavily
for the experience by which it profits now, that
there is a charge to be met of some twelve
hundred a year, interest on debt incurred in its
young days. For the last twenty years the college
has paid this out of its earnings, while providing
liberally from the same source for the
minds and bodies of its students. Abandoning
illusions and endeavours to achieve
desirable impossibilities, it has attained a degree
of efficiency which brings visitors from France,
Spain, Germany, Sweden, and the United
States to look into its system. It draws pupils
also from distant parts of the old world and
of the new. To this condition of a widely
recognised efficiency the Farmers' College has
attained, and it is working on towards yet
higher attainable results. The number of
students has, of late years, been steadily
rising, and now mounts to seventy, which is
within ten of the largest number that can be
accommodated in the handsome gothic building
set up by the sanguine founders of the institution.
In a few years there will not be room
for all applicants. A case in its natural history
museum shows how greatly the yield of wheat
may be improved by the use of picked seed.
When there can be a preliminary examination
for the picking of the best prepared and
aptest minds, and more or less exclusion of the
weak and idle, the tillage of brains in the
Cirencester College, already so successful, will
show finer and more uniform results.

British farming always has been in the front
rank of that form of industry. A Book of
Husbandry, written more than three centuries
ago by one of Henry the Eighth's judges of the
Common Pleas, at a time when cultivated
herbage and edible roots were unknown in
England, is said to contain little that is not
permanently true about the cultivation of corn, and
clearly to point out errors of practice which
have been transmitted from the untaught father
to his untaught son, even to this day, in some
English districts. Twenty-three years after the
printing of that book of Fitzherbert's, husbandry
came to honour of verse in Thomas Tusser's
Five Hundred Points of Husbandry, a book
which indicates many a then recent increase to
our agricultural wealth. Hops, introduced
early in the century, had become a common