Statesmen and professional men, whether occupying stations of eminence, or
struggling to attain them, duly estimate the importance of time; they know
the value of an hour too well to mis-spend it. The lawyer of high
practice, during the term season, steadily pursuing his laborious studies,
and determined to overcome every difficulty in his pursuit of professional
rank and wealth, rises early, and borrows from the night so many of those
hours which are spent in rest and sleep by men of less mental activity,
that he leaves himself but a very contracted measure of time for those
essential purposes. As to dining out with friends at this period of care
and labour, he rarely ventures to indulge in such a recreation; or if he
does on some very particular occasion, such is the discipline of his mind,
such the strength of his self-denying habits, that he can rise from the
table at a prescribed moment, and with a cool lawyer-like head apply to
his nocturnal labours as if there had been no interruption of an exciting
nature.
The physician--I do not mean him who is regularly called out of church, or
from the social party, by his servant, under the pretence of a pressing
call, but the real and laborious practitioner, to whom minutes are money
and fame--will not idle away an hour; neither will the sober steady
shopkeeper, until he has realized an independence, absent himself from his
counter as long as there is a reasonable chance of a customer dropping in;
nor the operative mechanic, who has to finish his piece of work within a
prescribed time, and who will contrive to do it even in despite of all the
petty interruptions to which he is liable.
Time is proportionably valuable to the meanest peasant who possesses a
cabbage garden, and if properly estimated and applied, will add to his
comforts in a degree of which, he who is habitually uncalculating and
unthrifty in this respect can have but little notion.
This I am anxious to impress upon the class of labourers, many of whom I
hope can read what I write, for in them I take an especial interest,
probably because they are the least cared for of any class in the
community. Some of them perhaps will say, with a show of reality, “If
_our_ time were to bring us in such profits as the counsellor and the
doctor make, we would be busy too, and no one would see us standing idle,
sitting on a ditch side, or smoking and coshering by the fireside, or
talking to the neighbours, of a wet day, in a forge. If we could be
coining guineas as easily as the likes of them makes the money, sitting in
their soft chairs, and never doing a hand’s turn of work that would tire
their limbs, we would; but what _could_ we make, after our regular day’s
work, if we can get that same, out of a bit of a garden, that would better
us any thing to signify?”
Now, I shall show them by actual facts what they _could_ in many cases do.
Johnny Halfacre is a little farmer, whom I occasionally see, and who,
being in no way connected with me, nor even conscious that I am
particularly observing him, goes on in his own way, without any hint or
encouragement from me, or indeed from any one else, as far as I can
perceive.
Johnny two years ago had not as much land as would correspond with his
name, which is really genuine; he had for several previous years but a
rood, including the site of his house, and a shed for a pig, and some
poultry; but this rood produced more than half an acre usually does with
many, and entirely by his good management and judicious application of
_time_.
Johnny had exactly five shillings a-week, paid in full every Friday
evening, from his employer, for Johnny never had time to be sick, far less
to be drunk, and always avoided broken days, by contriving in-door work,
at Mr B.’s, in wet weather; his wife, who had two children, washed
occasionally for a neighbour’s family, thus adding two shillings and
sixpence each week to their income, and the contribution of additional
suds to the dunghill; but in other respects they had no advantage over
other labourers. Their own little garden added greatly to the support of
the family, by judicious cropping and excellent management. Johnny had
every year some drills of very early ash-leaved potatoes put down in
January, if possible, which he either sold at a very high price in summer
at a neighbouring town, or consumed as he found most economical; and his
early sowing of potatoes was far better than the more common practice of
the Irish cottier, who leaves his garden uncropped with them until March
or April, with the view of obtaining a more abundant crop (but of
inferior quality) at a late season, when they might be purchased at a mere
trifle, and that, too, without the advantage of a second crop of any
description to succeed them. Johnny had too much sense for this: he began
to dig his dish of potatoes for dinner in the first or second week in
July, when his neighbours were half starving, or paying exorbitantly for
oatmeal and old potatoes; and as he dug out his crop, he either sowed
turnips, with a little ashes and a sprinkling of dung, or planted borecole
for the winter; generally he had some of both, for he found turnips good
for his own table in winter, and profitable for the support of some
poultry, of which I shall take notice soon. He had also every variety of
common kitchen vegetables in small patches, continually changing places,
and thus improving the soil; he had, besides, two hives of bees; and for
the sake of the _straw_, as well as for rotation, and the support of his
pig and poultry, a little rye, vetches, or clover.
Johnny, however, only worked in the garden in the evening, after his
ordinary day’s work, or, in summer, at sunrise; yet there never was a weed
to be seen in it, for they never had time to grow: by using the hoe for a
few moments now and then, they were always kept down, and every waste
blade and briar and useless sod around the hedge which enclosed it, was
carefully pared and burnt for manure.
He had worked in the large garden of a gentleman who kept an English
gardener, who had taught Johnny the use of a _sprong_ in preference to a
spade for turning up the earth, especially when too hard for the latter
implement; and though the handle was short, and, according to my own
notion, fatiguing to the back, the fact was, that Johnny soon preferred it
for dispatch and correctness of operation to the long-handled spade which
all my other neighbours use. When he cut his own rye or other corn, the
ground was usually so hard that a broad spade could not enter it: but
Johnny quickly turned it up and broke it with his sprong, and then
completely pulverized it with what the Englishman called a beck, a
three-forked hoe, which, acting like the long tines of a harrow, loosened
and rendered the whole perfectly fine, while it brought any latent roots
of couch (or scutch grass) that might have escaped on former occasions, to
the surface.
Johnny’s various vegetables greatly assisted his housekeeping. He had
often a good bowl of soup, flavoured with leeks, onions, carrots, &c.,
made with the least conceivable portion of meat, but thickened with
barley, properly shelled, and prepared like French barley, but at only
one-third of the price of that which is sold under such denomination in
the shops; and his family always breakfasted on porridge, or coarse bread
of their _own baking_, with or without milk, according to
circumstances--for Johnny at this time had no cow--sometimes washed down
with a cup of tea, and more generally in winter with a mug of light and
good table beer, which the Englishman taught Johnny to brew at Mr B.’s
brew-house. Half a bushel of malt, with a quarter of a pound of hops,
produced ten gallons of _unadulterated_ beer which could not be bought any
where, and the grains (given to his pig) fully counterbalanced the cost of
fuel. Even at this time he killed a pig every year, and never wanted a
small supply of salt meat for his cabbage or beans, which with this
combination of flesh went farther in this way towards the actual supply of
his dinner, and sometimes of his supper too (for any remainder of the
dinner was heated and peppered up for the supper, with the addition of a
broken loaf, or a skillet full of potatoes), than can be imagined by the
poor man who has never cultivated his garden in the same manner--whose
cabbages are of little value from want of bacon, and whose allotment,
producing but one crop instead of two each year, is thus of but half its
proper value to him; besides, with him potatoes succeed potatoes
continually, until the ground becomes sick of yielding them.
But, further, Johnny Halfacre’s garden, in which he seldom ceased from
doing something in the summer evenings as long as daylight lasted, greatly
aided in supporting his pig at that time when food is so dear and scarce
for swine. The tops of blossoming bean-stalks (by the plucking off of
which the crop is improved) and other vegetable waste, besides vetches and
rye--the latter both in the green and ripe state--gave him sufficient food
to keep the pig in fair order, with a little help from other sources; and
the pig, by being always well littered, and supplied with this food, gave
a return in most excellent manure, which with other sources of a similar
kind, and the economical distribution of crops, supplied the entire garden
with fertilizing matter.
What the other means of providing manure were, ought to be mentioned, for
the man’s system is of such easy application that it only requires to be
stated in order to be followed.
For two or three evenings in the summer before last, I perceived Johnny
Halfacre without his coat, rolling a wheelbarrow frequently from an
adjacent common to a corner of his garden separated from the road by an
old weather-beaten paling. When I had leisure to see what he had been
doing at this time, I found that he had marked off an oblong space for
four geese and a gander, which he had bought from Bridget Gozzard at
rather a high price, partly for the sake of their powerful manure, which,
combined with other substances, is good for stimulating the growth of
vegetables, as well as for the profit which he expected to realize by
rearing goslings for the market. Johnny was aware that fat green geese are
worth from six to ten shillings each, in the very early season in the
great English markets, and are also profitable if reared for the stubbles
at Michaelmas; and he did not see why he and his industrious wife should
not realise a profit as well as English housewives by the breeding of such
poultry, when a steam-packet and a rail-road could take them off even to
London in a few hours. Cocks and hens would ruin his own garden, and bring
him into disputes with his neighbours--he had the advantage of a run on
the common for geese--there was a pond of water near his house--and
therefore he gave them and ducks the preference. He first built his back
wall two feet and a half high and ten feet in length, with the sods from
the common, and then put down ten upright stakes in front, every pair
answering for the jambs of each compartment, with a board stretching the
whole length across, and which formed the front support of his rustic
roof; from this board he laid rafters to the top of the back wall, and
having first interwoven some small branches of a tree through these
rafters, he laid as many scraws (thinly pared grassy sods) as secured the
whole roof from rain. The jambs were then contracted to a narrow opening,
for the sake of shelter and warmth, by more sods laid one over the other.
By this simple process of construction he formed a separate chamber for
each bird, with a yard in front six feet broad and ten long, and with an
opening through the paling at the road side, by which the inmates could go
in and out at their pleasure. His rye assisted in feeding them, and he
also cultivated grey peas for them, which are excellent for fattening; and
with cabbage and lettuce leaves, the pods of beans, and other green food,
he afterwards kept them in high condition; and in the succeeding year,
when other young geese were dying of disease, occasioned by want of
shelter, and from _starvation_, his were thriving.
And to the credit of this worthy man and his wife I must mention, that the
feather-plucker was indignantly sent away from his door whenever he came
round for the execrable purpose of plucking the geese alive. Johnny’s wife
would as soon have let him pull out the hairs of her own head, as give up
one of her birds to his barbarous hands; and the consequence was, that
while their neighbours’ geese were miserably crawling about, with
draggling and mutilated wings and smarting bodies, until many of them
died, in their miseries invoking as it were in their dying screams shame
and curses on their unfeeling owners, Johnny Halfacre’s geese strutted
about on the common, with an independent and unconstrained step, as if
conscious of their security from the tortures to which their fellows had
been doomed.