_Royston, Monday morning, 21st Jan., 1822._
Came from London, yesterday noon, to this town on my way to Huntingdon.
My road was through Ware. Royston is just within the line (on the
Cambridgeshire side), which divides Hertfordshire from Cambridgeshire.
On this road, as on almost all the others going from it, the enormous
_Wen_ has swelled out to the distance of about six or seven miles.--The
land till you come nearly to Ware which is in Hertfordshire, and which
is twenty-three miles from the _Wen_, is chiefly a strong and deep loam,
with the gravel a good distance from the surface. The land is good
wheat-land; but I observed only three fields of Swedish turnips in the
23 miles, and no wheat drilled. The wheat is sown on ridges of great
width here-and-there; sometimes on ridges of ten, at others on ridges of
seven, on those of five, four, three, and even two, feet wide. Yet the
bottom is manifestly not very wet generally; and that there is not a
bottom of clay is clear from the poor growth of the oak trees. All the
trees are shabby in this country; and the eye is incessantly offended by
the sight of _pollards_, which are seldom suffered to disgrace even the
meanest lands in Hampshire or Sussex. As you approach Ware the bottom
becomes chalk of a dirtyish colour, and, in some parts, far below the
surface. After you quit Ware, which is a mere market town, the land
grows by degrees poorer; the chalk lies nearer and nearer to the
surface, till you come to the open common-fields within a few miles of
Royston. Along here the land is poor enough. It is not the stiff red
loam mixed with large blue-grey flints, lying upon the chalk, such as
you see in the north of Hampshire; but a whitish sort of clay, with
little yellow flattish stones amongst it; sure signs of a hungry soil.
Yet this land bears wheat sometimes.--Royston is at the foot of this
high poor land; or, rather in a dell, the open side of which looks
towards the North. It is a common market town. Not mean, but having
nothing of beauty about it; and having on it, on three of the sides out
of the four, those very ugly things, common-fields, which have all the
nakedness, without any of the smoothness, of Downs.
_Huntingdon, Tuesday morning, 22nd Jan., 1822._
Immediately upon quitting Royston, you come along, for a considerable
distance, with enclosed fields on the left and open common-fields on the
right. Here the land is excellent. A dark, rich loam, free from stones,
on chalk beneath at a great distance. The land appears, for a mile or
two, to resemble that at and near Faversham in Kent, which I have before
noticed. The fields on the left seem to have been enclosed by Act of
Parliament; and they certainly are the most beautiful tract of _fields_
that I ever saw. Their extent may be from ten to thirty acres each.
Divided by quick-set hedges, exceedingly well planted and raised. The
whole tract is nearly a perfect level. The cultivation neat, and the
stubble heaps, such as remain out, giving a proof of great crops of
straw, while, on land with a chalk bottom, there is seldom any want of a
proportionate quantity of grain. Even here, however, I saw but few
Swedish turnips, and those not good. Nor did I see any wheat drilled;
and observed that, in many parts, the broad-cast sowing had been
performed in a most careless manner, especially at about three miles
from Royston, where some parts of the broad lands seemed to have had the
seed flung along them with a shovel, while other parts contained only
here and there a blade; or, at least, were so thinly supplied as to make
it almost doubtful whether they had not been wholly missed. In some
parts the middles only of the ridges were sown thickly. This is shocking
husbandry. A Norfolk or a Kentish farmer would have sowed a bushel and
a half of seed to the acre here, and would have had a far better plant
of wheat.--About four miles, I think it is, from Royston you come to the
estate of Lord Hardwicke. You see the house at the end of an avenue
about two miles long, which, however, wants the main thing, namely, fine
and lofty trees. The soil here begins to be a very stiff loam at top;
clay beneath for a considerable distance; and, in some places, beds of
yellow gravel with very large stones mixed in it. The land is generally
cold; a great deal of draining is wanted; and yet the bottom is such as
not to be favourable to the growth of the _oak_, of which sort I have
not seen one _handsome_ tree since I left London. A grove, such as I saw
at Weston in Herefordshire, would, here, be a thing to attract the
attention of all ranks and all ages. What, then, would they say, on
beholding a wood of Oaks, Hickories, Chestnuts, Walnuts, Locusts,
Gum-trees, and Maples in America!--Lord Hardwicke's avenue appears to be
lined with Elms chiefly. They are shabby. He might have had _ash_; for
the ash will grow _anywhere_; on sand, on gravel, on clay, on chalk, or
in swamps. It is surprising that those who planted these rows of trees
did not observe how well the ash grows here! In the hedge-rows, in the
plantations, everywhere the ash is fine. The ash is the _hardiest_ of
all our large trees. Look at trees on any part of the sea coast. You
will see them all, even the firs, lean from the sea breeze, except the
ash. You will see the oak _shaved up_ on the side of the breeze. But the
ash stands upright, as if in a warm woody dell. We have no tree that
attains a greater height than the ash; and certainly none that equals it
in beauty of leaf. It bears pruning better than any other tree. Its
timber is one of the most useful; and as underwood and fire-wood it far
exceeds all others of English growth. From the trees of an avenue like
that of Lord Hardwicke a hundred pounds worth of fuel might, if the
trees were ash, be cut every year in prunings necessary to preserve the
health and beauty of the trees. Yet, on this same land, has his lordship
planted many acres of larches and firs. These appear to have been
planted about twelve years. If instead of these he had planted ash, four
years from the seed bed and once removed; had cut them down within an
inch of the ground the second year after planting; and had planted them
at four feet apart, he would now have had about six thousand ash-poles,
on an average twelve feet long, on each acre of land in his plantation;
which, at three-halfpence each, would have been worth somewhere nearly
forty pounds an acre. He might now have cut the poles, leaving about 600
to stand upon an acre to come to trees; and while these were growing to
timber, the underwood would, for poles, hoops, broom-sticks, spars,
rods, and faggots, have been worth twenty-five or thirty pounds an acre
every ten years. Can beggarly stuff, like larches and firs, ever be
profitable to this extent? Ash is timber, fit for the wheelwright, at
the age of twenty years, or less. What can you do with a rotten fir
thing at that age?----This estate of Lord Hardwicke appears to be very
large. There is a part which is, apparently, in his own hands, as,
indeed, the whole must soon be, unless he give up all idea of rent, or,
unless he can _choack off_ the fundholder or get again afloat on the sea
of paper-money. In this part of his land there is a fine piece of
_Lucerne_ in rows at about eighteen inches distant from each other. They
are now manuring it with _burnt-earth_ mixed with some dung; and I see
several heaps of burnt-earth hereabouts. The directions for doing this
are contained in my _Year's Residence_, as taught me by Mr. William
Gauntlet, of Winchester.--The land is, all along here, laid up in those
wide and high ridges, which I saw in Gloucestershire, going from
Gloucester to Oxford, as I have already mentioned. These ridges are
ploughed _back_ or _down_; but they are ploughed up again for every
sowing.--At an Inn near Lord Hardwicke's I saw the finest parcel of
dove-house pigeons I ever saw in my life.--Between this place and
Huntingdon is the village of Caxton, which very much resembles almost a
village of the same size in _Picardy_, where I saw the women dragging
harrows to harrow in the corn. Certainly this village resembles nothing
English, except some of the rascally rotten boroughs in Cornwall and
Devonshire, on which a just Providence seems to have entailed its curse.
The land just about here does seem to be really bad. The face of the
country is naked. The few scrubbed trees that now-and-then meet the eye,
and even the quick-sets, are covered with a yellow moss. All is bleak
and comfortless; and, just on the most dreary part of this most dreary
scene, stands almost opportunely, "_Caxton Gibbet_," tendering its
friendly one arm to the passers-by. It has recently been fresh-painted,
and written on in conspicuous characters, for the benefit, I suppose, of
those who cannot exist under the thought of wheat at four shillings a
bushel.--Not far from this is a new house, which, the coachman says,
belongs to a Mr. Cheer, who, if report speaks truly, is not, however,
notwithstanding his name, guilty of the sin of making people either
drunkards or gluttons. Certainly the spot, on which he has built his
house, is one of the most ugly that I ever saw. Few spots have
everything that you could wish to find; but this, according to my
judgment, has everything that every man of ordinary taste would wish to
avoid.--The country changes but little till you get quite to Huntingdon.
The land is generally quite open, or in large fields. Strong,
wheat-land, that wants a good deal of draining. Very few turnips of any
sort are raised; and, of course, few sheep and cattle kept. Few trees,
and those scrubbed. Few woods, and those small. Few hills, and those
hardly worthy of the name. All which, when we see them, make us cease to
wonder, that this country is so famous for _fox-hunting_. Such it has
doubtless been in all times, and to this circumstance Huntingdon, that
is to say, Huntingdun, or Huntingdown, unquestionably owes its name;
because _down_ does not mean _unploughed_ land, but open and
_unsheltered_ land, and the Saxon word is _dun_.--When you come down
near to the town itself, the scene suddenly, totally, and most
agreeably, changes. The _River Ouse_ separates Godmanchester from
Huntingdon, and there is, I think, no very great difference in the
population of the two. Both together do not make up a population of more
than about five thousand souls. Huntingdon is a slightly built town,
compared with Lewes, for instance. The houses are not in general so
high, nor made of such solid and costly materials. The shops are not so
large and their contents not so costly. There is not a show of so much
business and so much opulence. But Huntingdon is a very clean and nice
place, contains many elegant houses, and the environs are beautiful.
Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most
beautiful, and by far the most beautiful, meadows that I ever saw in my
life. The meadows at Lewes, at Guildford, at Farnham, at Winchester, at
Salisbury, at Exeter, at Gloucester, at Hereford, and even at
Canterbury, are nothing, compared with those of Huntingdon in point of
beauty. Here are no reeds, here is no sedge, no unevennesses of any
sort. Here are _bowling-greens_ of hundreds of acres in extent, with a
river winding through them, full to the brink. _One_ of these meadows is
the _race-course_; and so pretty a spot, so level, so smooth, so green,
and of such an extent I never saw, and never expected to see. From the
bridge you look across the valleys, first to the West and then to the
East; the valleys terminate at the foot of rising ground, well set with
trees, from amongst which church spires raise their heads
here-and-there. I think it would be very difficult to find a more
delightful spot than this in the world. To my fancy (and every one to
his taste) the prospect from this bridge far surpasses that from
Richmond Hill.--All that I have yet seen of Huntingdon I like
exceedingly. It is one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined
places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy.
JOURNAL: HERTFORDSHIRE, AND BUCKINGHAMSHIRE: TO ST. ALBANS, THROUGH
EDGWARE, STANMORE, AND WATFORD, RETURNING BY REDBOURN, HEMPSTEAD, AND
CHESHAM.
_Saint Albans, June 19, 1822._
From Kensington to this place, through Edgware, Stanmore, and Watford,
the crop is almost entirely hay, from fields of permanent grass, manured
by dung and other matter brought from the _Wen_. Near the Wen, where
they have had the _first haul_ of the Irish and other perambulating
labourers, the hay is all in rick. Some miles further down it is nearly
all in. Towards Stanmore and Watford, a third, perhaps, of the grass
remains to be cut. It is curious to see how the thing regulates itself.
We saw, all the way down, squads of labourers, of different departments,
migrating from tract to tract; leaving the cleared fields behind them
and proceeding on towards the work to be yet performed; and then, as to
the classes of labourers, the _mowers_, with their scythes on their
shoulders, were in front, going on towards the standing crops, while the
_haymakers_ were coming on behind towards the grass already cut or
cutting. The weather is fair and warm; so that the public-houses on the
road are pouring out their beer pretty fast, and are getting a good
share of the wages of these thirsty souls. It is an exchange of beer for
sweat; but the tax-eaters get, after all, the far greater part of the
sweat; for, if it were not for the tax, the beer would sell for
three-halfpence a pot instead of fivepence. Of this threepence-halfpenny
the Jews and Jobbers get about twopence-halfpenny. It is curious to
observe how the different labours are divided as to the _nations_. The
mowers are all _English_; the haymakers all _Irish_. Scotchmen toil hard
enough in Scotland; but when they go from home it is not to _work_, if
you please. They are found in gardens, and especially in gentlemen's
gardens. Tying up flowers, picking dead leaves off exotics, peeping into
melon-frames, publishing the banns of marriage between the "_male_" and
"_female_" blossoms, tap-tap-tapping against a wall with a hammer that
weighs half an ounce. They have backs as straight and shoulders as
square as heroes of Waterloo; and who can blame them? The digging, the
mowing, the carrying of loads, all the break-back and sweat-extracting
work, they leave to be performed by those who have less _prudence_ than
they have. The great purpose of human art, the great end of human study,
is to obtain _ease_, to throw the burden of labour from our own
shoulders, and fix it on those of others. The crop of hay is very large,
and that part which is in, is in very good order. We shall have hardly
any hay that is not fine and sweet; and we shall have it, carried to
London, at less, I dare say, than 3_l._ a load, that is 18 cwt. So that
here the _evil_ of "_over-production_" will be great indeed! Whether we
shall have any projects for taking hay into _pawn_ is more than any of
us can say; for, after what we have seen, need we be surprised if we
were to hear it proposed to take butter and even milk into pawn. In
after times, the mad projects of these days will become proverbial. The
Oracle and the over-production men will totally supplant the
_March-hare_.--This is, all along here, and especially as far as
Stanmore, a very dull and ugly country: flat, and all grass-fields and
elms. Few _birds_ of any kind, and few _constant_ labourers being
wanted; scarcely any cottages and gardens, which form one of the great
beauties of a country. Stanmore is on a hill; but it looks over a
country of little variety, though rich. What a difference between the
view here and those which carry the eye over the coppices, the
corn-fields, the hop-gardens and the orchards of Kent! It is miserable
land from Stanmore to Watford, where we get into Hertfordshire. Hence to
Saint Albans there is generally chalk at bottom with a red tenacious
loam at top, with flints, grey on the outside and dark blue within.
Wherever this is the soil, the wheat grows well. The crops, and
especially that of the barley, are very fine and very forward. The
wheat, in general, does not appear to be a heavy crop; but the ears seem
as if they would be full from bottom to top; and we have had so much
heat, that the grain is pretty sure to be plump, let the weather, for
the rest of the summer, be what it may. The produce depends more on the
weather, previous to the coming out of the ear, than on the subsequent
weather. In the Northern parts of America, where they have, some years,
not heat enough to bring the Indian Corn to perfection, I have observed
that, if they have about fifteen days with the thermometer at _ninety_,
before the ear makes its appearance, the crop never fails, though the
weather may be ever so unfavourable afterwards. This allies with the old
remark of the country people in England, that "_May_ makes or mars the
wheat;" for it is in May that the ear and the grains are _formed_.
_Kensington, June 24, 1822._
Set out at four this morning for Redbourn, and then turned off to the
Westward to go to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and Chesham. The
_wheat_ is good all the way. The barley and oats good enough till I came
to Hempstead. But the land along here is very fine: a red tenacious
flinty loam upon a bed of chalk at a yard or two beneath, which, in my
opinion, is the very best _corn land_ that we have in England. The
fields here, like those in the rich parts of Devonshire, will bear
perpetual grass. Any of them will become upland meadows. The land is, in
short, excellent, and it is a real corn-country. The _trees_, from
Redbourn to Hempstead are very fine; oaks, ashes, and beeches. Some of
the finest of each sort, and the very finest ashes I ever saw in my
life. They are in great numbers, and make the fields look most
beautiful. No villanous things of the _fir-tribe_ offend the eye here.
The custom is in this part of Hertfordshire (and I am told it continues
into Bedfordshire) to leave a _border_ round the ploughed part of the
fields to bear grass and to make hay from, so that, the grass being now
made into hay, every corn field has a closely mowed grass walk about ten
feet wide all round it, between the corn and the hedge. This is most
beautiful! The hedges are now full of the shepherd's rose, honeysuckles,
and all sorts of wild flowers; so that you are upon a grass walk, with
this most beautiful of all flower gardens and shrubberies on your one
hand, and with the corn on the other. And thus you go from field to
field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood
and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the
hedge-rows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of
_pleasure-grounds_ indeed! What, that man ever invented, under the name
of pleasure-grounds, can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?--This is a
profitable system too; for the ground under hedges bears little corn,
and it bears very good grass. Something, however, depends on the nature
of the soil: for it is not all land that will bear grass, fit for hay,
perpetually; and, when the land will not do that, these headlands would
only be a harbour for weeds and couch-grass, the seeds of which would
fill the fields with their mischievous race.--Mr. TULL has observed upon
the great use of headlands.--It is curious enough, that these headlands
cease soon after you get into Buckinghamshire. At first you see
now-and-then a field _without_ a grass headland; then it comes to
now-and-then a field _with_ one; and, at the end of five or six miles,
they wholly cease. Hempstead is a very pretty town, with beautiful
environs, and there is a canal that comes near it, and that goes on to
London. It lies at the foot of a hill. It is clean, substantially built,
and a very pretty place altogether. Between Hempstead and Chesham the
land is not so good. I came into Buckinghamshire before I got into the
latter place. Passed over two commons. But, still, the land is not bad.
It is drier; nearer the chalk, and not so red. The wheat continues good,
though not heavy; but the barley, on the land that is not very good, is
light, begins to look _blue_, and the backward oats are very short. On
the still thinner lands the barley and oats must be a very short
crop.--People do not sow _turnips_, the ground is so dry, and, I should
think, that the _Swede-crop_ will be very short; for _Swedes_ ought to
be _up_ at least by this time. If I had Swedes to sow, I would sow them
now, and upon ground very deeply and finely broken. I would sow directly
after the plough, not being half an hour behind it, and would roll the
ground as hard as possible. I am sure the plants would come up, even
without rain. And, the moment the rain came, they would grow
famously.--Chesham is a nice little town, lying in a deep and narrow
valley, with a stream of water running through it. All along the country
that I have come the labourers' dwellings are good. They are made of
what they call _brick-nog_; that is to say, a frame of wood, and a
single brick thick, filling up the vacancies between the timber. They
are generally covered with tile. Not _pretty_ by any means; but they are
good; and you see here, as in Kent, Susses, Surrey, and Hampshire, and,
indeed, in almost every part of England, that most interesting of all
objects, that which is such an honour to England, and that which
distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, namely, those _neatly
kept and productive little gardens round the labourers' houses_, which
are seldom unornamented with more or less of flowers. We have only to
look at these to know what sort of people English labourers are: these
gardens are the answer to the _Malthuses_ and the _Scarletts_. Shut your
mouths, you Scotch Economists; cease bawling, Mr. Brougham, and you
Edinburgh Reviewers, till _you_ can show us something, not _like_, but
approaching towards a likeness of _this_!
The orchards all along this country are by no means bad. Not like those
of Herefordshire and the north of Kent; but a great deal better than in
many other parts of the kingdom. The cherry-trees are pretty abundant
and particularly good. There are not many of the _merries_, as they call
them in Kent and Hampshire; that is to say, the little black cherry, the
name of which is a corruption from the French, _merise_, in the
singular, and _merises_ in the plural. I saw the little boys, in many
places, set to keep the birds off the cherries, which reminded me of the
time when I followed the same occupation, and also of the toll that I
used to take in payment. The children are all along here, I mean the
little children, locked out of the doors, while the fathers and mothers
are at work in the fields. I saw many little groups of this sort; and
this is one advantage of having plenty of room on the outside of a
house. I never saw the country children better clad, or look cleaner and
fatter than they look here, and I have the very great pleasure to add,
that I do not think I saw three acres of _potatoes_ in this whole tract
of fine country, from St. Albans to Redbourn, from Redbourn to
Hempstead, and from Hempstead to Chesham. In all the houses where I have
been, they use the roasted rye instead of coffee or tea, and I saw one
gentleman who had sown a piece of rye (a grain not common in this part
of the country) for the express purpose. It costs about three farthings
a pound, roasted and ground into powder.--The pay of the labourers
varies from eight to twelve shillings a-week. Grass mowers get two
shillings a-day, two quarts of what they call strong beer, and as much
small beer as they can drink. After quitting Chesham, I passed through a
wood, resembling, as nearly as possible, the woods in the more
cultivated parts of Long Island, with these exceptions, that there the
woods consist of a great variety of trees, and of more beautiful
foliage. Here there are only two sorts of trees, beech and oak: but the
wood at bottom was precisely like an American wood: none of that stuff
which we generally call underwood: the trees standing very thick in some
places: the shade so complete as never to permit herbage below: no
bushes of any sort; and nothing to impede your steps but little
spindling trees here and there grown up from the seed. The trees here
are as lofty, too, as they generally are in the Long Island woods, and
as straight, except in cases where you find clumps of the tulip-tree,
which sometimes go much above a hundred feet high as straight as a line.
The oaks seem here to vie with the beeches, in size as well as in
loftiness and straightness. I saw several oaks which I think were more
than eighty feet high, and several with a clear stem of more than forty
feet, being pretty nearly as far through at that distance from the
ground as at bottom; and I think I saw more than one, with a clear stem
of fifty feet, a foot and a half through at that distance from the
ground. This is by far the finest _plank oak_ that I ever saw in
England. The road through the wood is winding and brings you out at the
corner of a field, lying sloping to the south, three sides of it
bordered by wood and the field planted as an orchard. This is precisely
what you see in so many thousands of places in America. I had passed
through Hempstead a little while before, which certainly gave its name
to the Township in which I lived in Long Island, and which I used to
write _Hampstead_, contrary to the orthography of the place, never
having heard of such a place as _Hempstead_ in England. Passing through
Hempstead I gave my mind a toss back to Long Island, and this beautiful
wood and orchard really made me almost conceit that I was there, and
gave rise to a thousand interesting and pleasant reflections. On
quitting the wood I crossed the great road from London to Wendover,
went across the park of Mr. Drake, and up a steep hill towards the great
road leading to Wycombe. Mr. Drake's is a very beautiful place, and has
a great deal of very fine timber upon it. I think I counted pretty
nearly 200 oak trees, worth, on an average, five pounds a-piece, growing
within twenty yards of the road that I was going along. Mr. Drake has
some thousands of these, I dare say, besides his beech; and, therefore,
_he_ will be able to stand a tug with the fundholders for some time.
When I got to High Wycombe, I found everything a week earlier than in
the rich part of Hertfordshire. High Wycombe, as if the name was
ironical, lies along the bottom of a narrow and deep valley, the hills
on each side being very steep indeed. The valley runs somewhere about
from east to west, and the wheat on the hills facing the south will, if
this weather continue, be fit to reap in ten days. I saw one field of
oats that a bold farmer would cut next Monday. Wycombe is a very fine
and very clean market town; the people all looking extremely well; the
girls somewhat larger featured and larger boned than those in Sussex,
and not so fresh-coloured and bright-eyed. More like the girls of
America, and that is saying quite as much as any reasonable woman can
expect or wish for. The Hills on the south side of Wycombe form a park
and estate now the property of Smith, who was a banker or stocking-maker
at Nottingham, who was made a Lord in the time of Pitt, and who
purchased this estate of the late Marquis of Landsdowne, one of whose
titles is Baron Wycombe. Wycombe is one of those famous things called
Boroughs, and 34 votes in this Borough send Sir John Dashwood and Sir
Thomas Baring to the "collective wisdom." The landlord where I put up
"_remembered_" the name of Dashwood, but had "_forgotten_" who the
"_other_" was! There would be no forgettings of this sort, if these
thirty-four, together with _their_ representatives, were called upon to
pay the share of the National Debt due from High Wycombe. Between High
Wycombe and Beaconsfield, where the soil is much about that last
described, the wheat continued to be equally early with that about
Wycombe. As I approached Uxbridge I got off the chalk upon a gravelly
bottom, and then from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush on a bottom of clay.
Grass-fields and elm-trees, with here and there a wheat or a bean-field,
form the features of this most ugly country, which would have been
perfectly unbearable after quitting the neighbourhoods of Hempstead,
Chesham and High Wycombe, had it not been for the diversion I derived
from meeting, in all the various modes of conveyance, the cockneys going
to _Ealing Fair_, which is one of those things which nature herself
would almost seem to have provided for drawing off the matter and
giving occasional relief to the overcharged _Wen_. I have traversed
to-day what I think may be called an average of England as to
corn-crops. Some of the best, certainly; and pretty nearly some of the
worst. My observation as to the wheat is, that it will be a fair and
average crop, and extremely early; because, though it is not a heavy
crop, though the ears are not long they will be full; and the earliness
seems to preclude the possibility of blight, and to ensure plump grain.
The barley and oats must, upon an average, be a light crop. The peas a
light crop; and as to beans, unless there have been rains where beans
are mostly grown, they cannot be half a crop; for they will not endure
heat. I tried masagan beans in Long Island, and could not get them to
bear more than a pod or two upon a stem. Beans love cold land and shade.
The earliness of the harvest (for early it must be) is always a clear
advantage. This fine summer, though it may not lead to a good crop of
turnips, has already put safe into store such a crop of hay as I believe
England never saw before. Looking out of the window, I see the harness
of the Wiltshire wagon-horses (at this moment going by) covered with the
chalk-dust of that county; so that the fine weather continues in the
West. The saint-foin hay has all been got in, in the chalk countries,
without a drop of wet; and when that is the case, the farmers stand in
no need of oats. The grass crops have been large everywhere, as well as
got in in good order. The fallows must be in excellent order. It must be
a sloven indeed that will sow his wheat in foul ground next autumn; and
the sun, where the fallows have been well stirred, will have done more
to enrich the land than all the dung-carts and all the other means
employed by the hand of man. Such a summer is a great blessing; and the
only draw-back is, the dismal apprehension of not seeing such another
for many years to come. It is favourable for poultry, for colts, for
calves, for lambs, for young animals of all descriptions, not excepting
the game. The partridges will be very early. They are now getting into
the roads with their young ones, to roll in the dust. The first broods
of partridges in England are very frequently killed by the wet and cold;
and this is one reason why the game is not so plenty here as it is in
countries more blest with sun. This will not be the case this year; and,
in short, this is one of the finest years that I ever knew.