on his farm. Horsemen and gig men, with
carriage-men, arrive also, and some
pedestrians; there will be three hundred of us
here before the day is over.

An annual agricultural gathering it is
called; but they are not all farmers who are
here assembling, gossipping and making rapid
attacks upon a lunch table in storming parties
of fourteen. There are indeed stout farmers
dressed for the day in white corduroys and
yellow kids, blue stocks, and long napped
beavers, who think themselves good food
producers, as indeed they ought to be, for they
are evidently good food consumers; these form
among themselves one or two incredulous
knots, having no faith in magic about which
they have many a time on their own clods

   —"among themselves in pleasant vein
Stood scoffing."

But there are also farmers, whose stout
frames and wholesome faces tell only of the
healthy character of an occupation that has by
no means dulled their minds. These, though
they are some of them old men, have evidently
come to learn what may be learnt. There
are one or two young farmers with eye-glasses,
hard faces and crops of hair that has been
well manured with grease about the roots:
these evidently have nothing to learn—but
there are other young men about whom old
men cluster, young men who have things to
teach, who have followed with keen eye the
movements of the world, who have invented
implements and given solid produce from
their minds, who have themselves attained
rank as magicians, and to whose call already
spirits of the soil yield up their hidden
treasures.

There are others in this group of many-
minded men who have a thoughtful town-
bred aspect. Some are impressed with the
belief that there exists an intimate connexion
between health in houses and fertility in
fields. Many men, therefore, whose names
are eminent among the advocates of public
health, scholars and noblemen whose talents
are devoted—as all talents ought to be devoted
—to the furtherance of human progress, have
come down to see the magic farm, and are
now making assaults upon the farmer's lunch.
The eyes of the country which communicate
with the great head through its optic nerve,
the Press, are also here; that is to say, there
is a sprinkling of the representatives of
newspapers. If there be no magic in the matter,
certainly there must be marvel. If we are
to say no more than that a successful London
tradesman has gone down to Essex and
applied London habits of free energy and
enterprise to the cultivation of the soil, it certainly
supplies us matter for reflection when we see
him, as we now see Mr. Mechi (lunch being
laid waste), set out from his own door to walk
about his farm, followed and watched by
three hundred men who represent all classes
of opinion, among whom are some of the
leading farmers and sanitary reformers, with
a fair representation of the educated classes
in this country, of the nobility, the gentry,
and the public in general, with the ambassadors
to London from America and Belgium.
All these follow each other in a long file
through the fields of Tiptree Hall to see and
hear what has been done upon a farm of no
greater extent than one hundred and fifty
acres.

We traverse a garden that is smiling where
the heath once frowned, and walk through
a shrubbery of laurels growing there in token
of the victory obtained in the great battle of
civilisation fought on Tiptree Hill; so we come
upon the farm, and one field that is more
especially the farmer's field of glory. There is a
piece of water near it, a small square cutting in
the ground—some two feet square, perhaps;
about this cutting the visitors collect. A pipe
is discharging into it a full and even stream of
water, which again passes out through another
pipe, leaving a clear little pool into which a
brown jug is dipped. The brown jug passes
as a loving cup from lip to lip filled with
delicious bog water. Bog water!—it may be
magic, or it may be enterprise—but this fine
field of ripening corn, four and a half quarters
to the acre, was a bog when it was included
in the eligible site of Tiptree Farm. Horses
that came too near the spot over which we
are now walking cheerfully enough under the
summer sun, sank as flies do in treacle, and
had to be dragged out by their yoke-fellows.
Drain-pipes were sunk some sixteen feet
under the surface of the bog; the water that
was feeding on the substance of the land
was caught in pipes, and carried off to feed
the land elsewhere with its own substance.
This is the water flowing for many hours
daily by the square cutting over which we
stand, and it supplies a large part of the
water used for fertilising purposes throughout
the farm. The bog land, after drainage,
shrank as a sponge shrinks when the water
is pressed out of it, and its level fell several
feet, so that the drain-pipes do not now lie
at an unreasonable depth below the surface.
The transformation of a bog into a wheat
field is good magic, or good work to be done
before the farmers by a City tradesman.

But the City tradesman's farming does not
pay. Certainly it has not paid up to the
present time; nobody gives franker or fuller
means for ascertaining that than the Farmer
of Tiptree Hall himself. It is not, however,
every man who encloses bog land and heath
when he desires to own a profitable farm. It
should be remembered also that the energy
of Leadenhall Street, first let loose upon Essex,
would be likely to make awkward agricultural
mistakes, and did make such mistakes, for
which it received good-humouredly the
amplest share of ridicule, and set to work
about amending them with undiminished
zeal. It should be remembered also that the
desire of the Farmer of Tiptree Hall is not