food for a great number of lambs and sheep.
Under the old system, two hundred acres of
this farm were poor grass pasture. Under
the rotation named they feed more live stock
than before, in addition to the crops of wheat
twice in six years. Of course on six fields two
are always in wheat. But on hundreds of
thousands of acres of fertile under-rented
land, the intelligent cultivation of roots is
quite unknown; indeed, without security of
tenure in lease or agreement, it cannot be
practised, because it takes six years to
complete a never-ending circle of improvement.
There are landed baronets, who
having gone so far ahead as to adopt the
short-horn, which superseded their
grandfathers' long-cherished, long-horned, thick-
skinned, Craven beasts, still look askance at
guano and superphosphate—the best food
for root crops—as condiments of
revolutionary origin; and as for leases, you may
as well speak of confiscation at once.

As we looked down the beautiful fertile
valley, and gossipped over the cardinal
principles of good farming, we could see the
marks in the shades of vegetation, and here
and there a land-mark in a stately tree, where
four miles of fences had seven years
previously been cleared away, and superseded
wherever fences were needed at all, by double
ditches, and rails arranged with
mathematical regularity to protect growing thorns
from the assaults of the beasts and sheep
feeding around. Before coals came by canal
and railway, hedges gave faggots for winter
fires.

Turning our nags' heads upwards, we next
traversed the sand half of the farm, an
undulating four hundred acres, sprinkled over
with many pretty wooded dells and bordered
deep belts of plantation, where our friend,
having the game in his own hands, kept up a
fair head of pheasants and hares. Farmers
seldom object to the game they may shoot
themselves.

On the sand we found a different rotation,
viz., turnips, barley, clover, and wheat;
neither mangold or beans.

The prettiest sight was our farmer's breeding
flock of South Downs, feeding on a hill of
seeds: four hundred black-faced, close-fleeced,
firkin-bodied, flat-backed, short-legged, active
animals, without a hollow or a bump on any
part of their compact bodies, as like each
other as peas, and as full of meat.

They were under the amiable care of an
old shepherd, a boy, and a dog of great
discretion—a real Scotch colley, who also
attend to the whole sheep stock. It had cost
our farmer twenty years of constant care to
bring this flock to their present perfection,
during which time he has tried and given up
the long-woolled Leicester, of which half his
sheep stock formerly consisted, finding the
South Down more hardy and profitable on his
land and with his market. The total sheep
stock always kept on this farm amounts to one
thousand head, of which what are not bred
on the farm are bought. Thus in the course
of the year about one thousand sheep and
lambs, and one hundred and fifty bullocks,
are sent to market.

Now we had seen all the raw material for
growing corn and wool.

Bullocks fed in yards in autumn and
winter, on roots grown on well-drained, and
hay on well-manured land, with corn and
cake to finish them—these produce while
getting fat, and tread down and solidify
manure which is ready in the spring to be
carted out where wanted, for growing more
roots for green or hay crops. On the other
hand, light land is consolidated and enriched
by a flock penned upon it, and there feeding
with turnips, corn, or pulse and cake. If
they are store-sheep they are allowed to gnaw
the turnips on the ground for part of the
year; if they are young and to be fatted, the
turnips are drawn, topped, and tailed, and
sliced for them by a boy with a portable
machine—a simple affair, and yet one of the
most valuable of agricultural inventions.
Thus, feeding in the day, and penned
successively over every part of a field at night, the
sheep fertilise, and with their feet compress
more effectively than any roller, light, blowing
sand, and prepare soil which once would
scarely feed a family of rabbits on an acre for
such luxuriant corn crops as we saw waving
around.

What neither farm-yard manure nor sheep-
treading will do toward stimulating vegetation
and supply the wants of an exhausted
soil, is done with modern portable manures,
which do not supersede, but aid the home-
made fertilisers of our forefathers.

Cantering on, now pausing to examine a
root crop, then pushing through a pheasant
cover, then halting to chat with the
reapers, we came to a field of wheat on sand
inferior to the rest. The choicest seed from
the Vale of Taunton Dean had been used;
but it seemed that, in this instance, what
suited a Somersetshire valley did not thrive
on a Bedfordshire hill. Such special
experience a good farmer is continually collecting.
Again: repeated trials had convinced the
farmer that guano, the most valuable of all
portable manures, was wasted on the sand;
as, in the event of a dry season, the fertilising
powers were evaporated and entirely lost.
On another fifty-six acres of wheat a
most wonderful crop was being mowed,
estimated at six quarters to the acre. The
extra weight could only be accounted for by
the field having been rolled with more than
ordinary care with a heavy iron roller.
Nevertheless, amateurs must not rush off to
roll their wheat fields, because on a plastic soil
it would be total ruin to reduce a field after
rain to the consistence of smooth mortar.

I have advisedly said, mow, not reap,
several times in this narrative. The Bedfordshire
farmer has no doubt of the superior