district chosen for the annual show is set
fermenting by the presence of the most agricultural
members of the society, and a general
invitation to all England to come forward
and compete for prizes with their agricultural
implements and live stock. This year the
great agricultural holiday was held at
Lincoln;—once the nucleus of Roman roads;
now in the centre of one of the finest
farming districts in the country, and
connected by railways with every county
between Plymouth and Aberdeen.

Eighty-four years ago, Arthur Young,
one of the most far-seeing and graphic
writers on English agriculture, made the
journey from Peterborough to Lincoln on
horseback, occupying twice as many days as
a railway train takes hours; following
ancient ways; partly of Roman construction,
and passing over causeways through
seas of fresh water, which now, thanks to
the Cornish steam-engines, have been drained
into fat pastures, where, on every acre, an
ox or cow, bred far north, can be fattened
for the London market.

As I approached Lincoln to be present at
the fourteen days' show the evidences of
the Past and Present met me on either hand.
Of the present, in the shape of solemn
but amiable-looking bulls, carefully clothed
in slices of Brussels carpet hemmed and
edged with tape; heifers of equally pure
blood, and Leicester and South Down sheep,
all riding comfortably in railway trucks. A
real monument of the Past rose on Dunston
Heath:—Dunston Tower, erected in the last
century as a lighthouse to guide travellers
across the black moor between Spilsby and
Lincoln,—a waste then, but now the centre of
farming as fine as any in Europe: at least so I
was told by a tall, rosy, wiry, pleasant-faced
farmer, in a full suit of shepherd's plaid. And
here I must note that the real John Bull
farmer, whom artists of a waning school
depict in top-boots, seated before a foaming
jug of nut-brown ale, and beside the portrait
of a prize ox, seems to have been
improved out of the country. My closest
researches at Lincoln did not discover a single
specimen.

There was no mistake about the character
of the meeting: it did not require top-boots
to indicate that it was not scientific, nor
antiquarian, nor literary, nor military, nor
commercial; but, that it was simply and
solely agricultural. The whole multitude
of strangers who crowded the street,—
studying the Latin motto of " Floreat
Lindum" inscribed in red letters upon white
calico, on the arch of evergreens, or holding
conversations round the steps of the
hotels—had a breezy out-of-door, healthy,
tallyhoish appearance. Black, bay, and gray
horses, of huge proportions, gaily adorned
with ribbons (the unmistakable sires of
London dray-horses), were led carefully
along towards the show-ground by the only
top-boots extant. Roan Short-horns, red
Devons, and white-faced Hereford bulls;
cows with interesting calves; and plump
heifers, paced along with a deliberation
and placidity worthy of their high breeding.
It is only young Highland kyloes and Scotch
runts that played wild tricks, and scampered,
as Leigh Hunt said of certain pigs, down all
manner of streets. Anon came a select pen
of ewes, or a ram, conducted with the sort
of care we can imagine the sultan's guard to
bestow on an importation of plump Circassian
beauties.

Guided out of sight of the bovine and
ovine procession by the shrill squeal of
discontented Yorkshire pigs nearly as large
as, and much heavier than, Alderney cows;
across the bridge over that Witham stream
through which Romans, and Danes, and Saxons,
and Normans, successively rowed on their way
to Peterborough; along a gay and dusty road,
where stood those wonderful works of art
dear to my childhood's dreams;—
Wombwellian wild beasts painted on acres of
canvass, in the most exciting situations;
at length I reached the show yard. The
parallelogram of some four acres contained an
epitome of the materials and tools which make
modern British agriculture what it is. There
were instruments for cultivating all sorts of
soils; and live stock which can be sent to the
butcher's in one fourth the time that our
ancestors found indispensable for producing fat
meat. In natural course the implements come
before the stock which they have helped to
bring to perfection.

The first operation for bringing our food
into a condition fit for the butcher or the
baker is to turn over the soil; for which,
the best implement that has yet been invented
is a plough. In the Lincoln yard there
were not less than thirty-nine sorts of iron
ploughs, for every degree of work, from
scratching the turf to turning up the earth
twenty inches deep. Those who have seen the
rude ploughs still in use in the south of
France and Italy (where the team is
often composed of a dwarf milch cow, a
donkey, and a wife; the husband holding the
one stilt) will be surprised to learn that in
seventeen hundred and thirty a plough was
made at Rotherham which was better than
those even now in use in the worst-cultivated
counties of England and "Wales; and that, so
far back as sixteen hundred and seventy-seven,
subsoiling or loosening the earth very deep
so as to let water fall through and fibres of
roots to penetrate one of the most valu-
able improvements of modern agriculture,
which we now owe to Smith of Deanston
was practised by a young man of
Kent. But in agriculture, above all other
useful arts, improvements and inventions not
only travel slowly, but are often despised
during the lifetime of the inventor; and, after
him, are forgotten.

The frame of the most approved ploughs is