advantages of the former plan. Nevertheless,
he reaps a few acres as shelter for the
partridges. Mowing is done by piece-work,
at per acre. Formerly the harvesters
received so much money per acre, and five
pints of beer for a day; but the farmer
having one July day expressed his discontent
to a party of mowers snugly lying in the
shade, pipe in mouth and beer-can in hand,
at the slow progress of the work, was
answered with fatal candour by a jolly foreman
—"Maister, we come here to drink your
good beer, and as long as you gie us five
pints a day we beant agoin' to hurry
the work." From that season an additional
shilling per acre replaced the five pints of
the mowing charter; and there is no lagging.
Mowers are not the only people who like
idleness and five pints of beer a day.

It was brilliant weather on the second day
of our visit. Carts, each drawn by one
cleaned-legged horse, were at work at a pace
that would have choked the old hairy-
legged breed. The picturesque wagon, with
its long team, is disappearing fast from modern
harvest-fields. The horse-rake, following the
binders, leaves little for the gleaners.

While the carts were at work in one field
and the mowers and binders in another—for
there were two hundred acres of wheat on
this farm—in a fallow-field a party of boys
were cross-ploughing with some of Howard's
beautiful wheel ploughs, which can be
managed by boys of thirteen, for such work
the object being only to pulverise the land.
On almost any land the superiority of the
iron-wheel plough is incontestable.

We rode back through a great grass field,
well dotted with shady trees, under which
shorthorns, Devons, Herefords, and black
Anglesea runts were comfortably chewing
the cud; all the different breeds being found
profitable to feed when bought at a proper
price, as the account-books of our friend,
carefully kept for twenty years, distinctly show.
From the horned stock and the sheep, a
draught of the fittest and fattest were sent
to Smithfield every week from May to the
following March, and replaced by fresh
purchases from the neighbouring fairs.

After dinner, while looking out between
rosebushes at the cattle on the hills, we
talked, of course of farming past and present
—of what practice and science had done,
and what it could and could not do for
farmers.

In what we had seen there was nothing
startling, although the results, as to quantity
of produce in corn and meat in a year, would
have been incredible if foretold to any brown-
coated farmer in seventeen hundred and
fifty-four. There was no land wasted by
fences or devoured by weeds; there was no
time lost—one crop prepared the way for
another; there was no labour lost—horses
and men and boys were fully employed. The
live stock for market was always full fed;
the breeding-stock was kept up by retaining
only the best-shaped ewe lambs, and hiring
or buying the best rams from skilled Southdown
breeders. So the farm was continually
sending to market a succession of lamb,
mutton, and beef.

All this requires for success some
considerable skill and experience, and not a
little expense. Twelve or thirteen hundred
pounds a-year for rent, and as much more
for wages; two hundred a-year poor's-
rates, no tithes; three hundred a-year
for corn and cake purchased; one hundred
and fifty pounds for portable manures. A
capital laid out in two hundred store beasts,
which cannot be bought for less than ten
pounds each, and four hundred breeding
ewes, worth two pounds ten shillings each
—also thirty carthorses, worth forty pounds
a-piece on the average, and all the
agricultural implements, too. So, in round
numbers there was evidently, without asking
impertinent questions, some ten thousand
pounds invested.

The labour of this farm would in its number
astonish a farmer of the old school of
anti-guano and anti-steam-engine prejudices,
as much as the implements. It consists
of about twenty men and thirty boys. Of
these, six men are ploughmen, and have the
care of four horses each, being assisted by
eight ploughboys. The boys are divided into
two sets, of which the younger consists of
fifteen boys between the ages of eleven and
thirteen, who are under the command of a
steady experienced farm-labourer. He never
has them out of his sight; under his orders
they do all the hand-hoeing of wheat, thin
out turnips, spud thistles out of grass-land,
gather the turnips into heaps for tailing,
carry away the straw from the threshing-
machine, bring the sheaves from the stack to
the man who feeds the machine, and do other
work suited to their strength. When the
harvest is off, and repeated ploughings have
brought the couch-grass roots to the surface,
they gather it in heaps and burn it. A great
bare field dotted over with heaps of this
troublesome weed, each on fire, and each
industriously fed and tended by an active
little boy, presented a very amusing sight to
us in a second visit to Bedfordshire, in
October.

Thus these boys are trained to work
regularly at all kinds of farm-labour, and form a
regiment of militia from which the regular
army of the farm is recruited. The most
intelligent are promoted to be ploughboys,
and grow up to be very useful men.

They receive three shillings a-week wages,
and every week, if well-behaved, a sixpenny
ticket, which, once a year, in September, is
converted into money to be laid out in clothes.
The stoppage of a ticket—a very rare occurrence
—is considered not only a loss, but
a disgrace. In harvest time they receive
double wages, and double tickets.