MAJOR Yammerton was rather a peculiar man, inasmuch as he was an
Ass, without being a Fool. He was an Ass for always puffing and
inflating himself, while as regarded worldly knowledge,
particularly that comprised in the magic letters £. s. d., few,
if any, were his equals. In the former department, he was always
either on the strut or the fret, always either proclaiming the
marked attention he had met with, or worrying himself with the
idea that he had not had enough. At home, instead of offering
people freely and hospitably what he had, he was continually
boring them with apologies for what he had not. Just as if all
men were expected to have things alike, or as if the Major was an
injured innocent who had been defrauded of his rights. If he was
not boring and apologising, then he was puffing or praising
everything indiscriminately—depending, of course, upon who he had
there—a great gun or a little one.
He returned from his Tantivy Castle hunt, very much pleased with
our Billy, who seemed to be just the man for his money, and by
the aid of his Baronetage he made him out to be very highly
connected. Mrs. Yammerton and the young ladies were equally
delighted with him, and it was unanimously resolved that he
should be invited to the Grange, for which purpose the standing
order of the house “never to invite any one direct from a great
house to theirs,” was suspended. A very salutary rule it is for
all who study appearances, seeing that what looks very well one
way may look very shady the other; but this being perhaps a case
of “now or never,” the exception would seem to have been
judiciously made. The heads of the house had different objects in
view; Mamma’s, of course, being matrimonial, the Major’s, the
laudable desire to sell Mr. Pringle a horse. And the mention of
Mamma’s object leads us to the young ladies.
These, Clara, Flora, and Harriet, were very pretty, and very
highly educated—that is to say, they could do everything that is
useless—play, draw, sing, dance, make wax-flowers, bead-stands,
do decorative gilding, and crochet-work; but as to knowing how
many ounces there are in a pound of tea, or how many pounds of
meat a person should eat in a day, they were utterly, entirely,
and most elegantly ignorant. Towards the close of the last
century, and at the beginning of the present one, ladies ran
entirely to domesticity, pickling, preserving, and pressing
people to eat. Corded petticoats and patent mangles long formed
the staple of a mid life woman’s conversation. Presently a new
era sprang up, which banished everything in the shape of
utilitarianism, and taught the then rising generation that the
less they knew of domestic matters the finer ladies they would
be, until we really believe the daughters of the nobility are
better calculated for wives, simply because they are generally
economically brought up, and are not afraid of losing _caste_, by
knowing what every woman ought to do. No man thinks the worse of
a woman for being able to manage her house, while few men can
afford to marry mere music-stools and embroidery frames. Mrs.
Yammerton, however, took a different view of the matter. She had
been brought up in the patent mangle and corded petticoat school,
and inwardly resolved that her daughters should know nothing of
the sort—should be “real ladies,” in the true kitchen acceptation
of the term. Hence they were mistresses of all the little
accomplishments before enumerated, which, with making calls and
drinking tea, formed the principal occupation of their lives. Not
one of them could write a letter without a copy, and were all
very uncertain in their spelling—though they knew to a day when
every King and Queen began to reign, and could spout all the
chief towns in the kingdom. Now this might have been all very
well, at least bearable, if the cockey Major had had plenty of
money to give them, but at the time they were acquiring them, the
“contrary was the case,” as the lawyers say. The Major’s
grandfather (his father died when he was young) had gone upon the
old annexation principle of buying land and buying land simply
because “it joined,” and not always having the cash to pay for it
with, our Major came into an estate (large or small, according as
the reader has more or less of his own) saddled with a good,
stout, firmly setting mortgage. Land, however, being the only
beast of burthen that does not show what it carries, our
orphan—orphan in top-boots to be sure—passed for his best, and
was speedily snapped up by the then beautiful, Italian—like Miss
Winnington, who consoled herself for the collapse of his fortune,
by the reflection that she had nothing of her own. Perhaps, too,
she had made allowance for the exaggeration of estimates, which
generally rate a man at three or four times his worth. The
Winningtons, however, having made a great “crow” at the “catch,”
the newly-married couple started at score as if the estate had
nothing to carry but themselves.
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In due time the three graces appeared,—Clara, very fair, with
large languishing blue eyes and light hair; Flora, with auburn
hair and hazel eyes; and Harriet, tall, clear, and dark, like
Mamma. As they grew up, and had had their heads made into
Almanacs at home, they were sent to the celebrated Miss
Featherey’s finishing and polishing seminary at Westbourne Grove,
who for £200 a-year, or as near £200 as she could get, taught
them all the airs and graces, particularly how to get in and out
of a carriage properly, how to speak to a doctor, how to a
counter-skipper, how to a servant, and so on. The Major, we may
state, had his three daughters taken as two. Well, just as Miss
Harriet was supplying the place of Miss Clara (polished), that
great agricultural revolution, the repeal of the corn laws, took
place, and our Major, who had regarded his estate more with an
eye to its hunting and shooting capabilities than to high
farming, very soon found it slipping away from him, just as Miss
de Glancey slipped away from her dress in the thunder-storm. Up
to that time, his easy-minded agent, Mr. Bullrush, a twenty stone
man of sixty years of age, had thought the perfection of
management was not to let an estate go back, but now the Major’s
seemed likely to slip through its girths altogether. To be sure,
it had not had any great assistance in the advancing line, and
was just the same sour, rush-grown, poachy, snipe-shooting
looking place that it was when the Major got it; but this was not
his grandfather’s fault, who had buried as many stones in great
gulf-like drains, as would have carried off a river and walled
the estate all round into the bargain; but there was no making
head against wet land with stone drains, the bit you cured only
showing the wetness of the rest. The blotchy March fallows looked
as if they had got the small pox, the pastures were hardly green
before Midsummer, and the greyhound-like cattle that wandered
over them were evidently of Pharaoh’s lean sort, and looked as if
they would _never_ be ready for the butcher. Foreign cattle, too,
were coming in free, and the old cry of “down corn, down horn,”
frightened the fabulously famed “stout British farmer” out of his
wits.
Then those valuable documents called leases—so binding on the
landlord, were found to be wholly inoperative on the tenants, who
threw up their farms as if there were no such things in
existence.
If the Major wouldn’t take their givings up, why then he might
just do his “warst;” meanwhile, of course, they would “do their
warst,” by the land. With those who had nothing (farming and
beer-shop keeping being about the only trades a man can start
with upon nothing), of course, it was of no use persisting, but
the awkward part of the thing was, that this probing of pockets
showed that in too many cases the reputed honesty of the British
farmer was also mere fiction; for some who were thought to be
well off, now declared that their capital was their aunt’s, or
their uncle’s, or their grandmother’s, or some one else’s, so
that the two classes, the have-somethings, and the have-nothings,
were reduced to a level. This sort of thing went on throughout
the country, and landlords who could not face the difficulty by
taking their estates in hand, had to submit to very serious
reductions of rent, and rent once got down, is very difficult to
get up again, especially in countries where they value by the
rate-book, or where a traditionary legend attaches to land of the
lowest rent it has ever been let for.
Our Major was sorely dispirited, and each market-day, as he
returned from Mr. Bullrush’s with worse and worse news than
before, he pondered o’er his misfortunes, fearing that he would
have to give up his hounds and his horses, withdraw his daughters
from Miss Featherey’s, and go to Boulogne, and as he contemplated
the airy outline of their newly-erected rural palace of a
workhouse, he said it was lucky they had built it, for he thought
they would all very soon be in it. Certainly, things got to their
worst in the farming way, before they began to mend, and such
land as the Major’s—good, but “salivated with wet,” as the cabman
said of his coat—was scarcely to be let at any price.
In these go-a-head days of farming, when the enterprising sons of
trade are fast obliterating the traces of the heavy-heel’d order
of easy-minded Hodges who,
——“held their farms and lived content While one year paid another’s
rent,”
without ever making any attempt at improvement, it may be amusing
to record the business-like offer of some of those indolent
worthies who would bid for a pig in a poke. Thus it runs:—It
should have been dated April 1, instead of 21:—
TO MAJOR YAMMERTON.
“Onard Sir,
_“Hobnail Hill, April 21. _
“Wheas We have considered we shall give you for Bonnyrig’s farme
the som £100 25 puns upon condishinds per year if you should
think it to little we may perhaps advance a little as we have not
looked her carefully over her and for character Mr. Sowerby will
give you every information as we are the third giniration that’s
been under the Sowerbys.
_“Yours sincerely,_
“Henerey Brown,
“Homfray Brown—Co.
“_If you want anye otes I could sell you fifteen bowels of verye
fine ones._”
Now the “som £100 25 puns” being less than half what the Major’s
grandfather used to get for the farm:—viz. “£200 63 puns,”—our
Major was considerably perplexed; and as “Henerey and Homfray”’s
offer was but a sample of the whole, it became a question between
Boulogne and Bastile, as those once unpopular edifices, the
workhouses, were then called. And here we may observe, that there
is nothing perhaps, either so manageable or so unmanageable as
land—nothing easier to keep right than land in good order, and
nothing more difficult to get by the head, and stop, than land
that has run wild; and it may be laid down as an infallible rule,
that the man who has no taste for land or horses should have
nothing to do with either. He should put his money in the funds,
and rail or steam when he has occasion to travel. He will be far
richer, far fatter, and fill the bay window of his club far
better, than by undergoing the grinding of farmers and the
tyranny of grooms. Land, like horses, when once in condition is
easily kept so, but once let either go down, and the owner
becomes a prey to the scratchers and the copers.
If, however, a man likes a little occupation better than the
eternal gossip, and “_who’s that?_” of the clubs, and prefers a
smiling improving landscape to a barren retrograding scene, he
will find no pleasanter, healthier, or more interesting
occupation than improving his property. And a happy thing it was
for this kingdom, that Prince Albert who has done so much to
refine and elevate mankind, should have included farming in the
list of his amusements,—bringing the before despised pursuit into
favour and fashion, so that now instead of land remaining a prey
to the “Henerey Browns & Co.” of life, we find gentlemen
advertising for farms in all directions, generally stipulating
that they are to be on the line of one or other of the once
derided railways.
But we are getting in advance of the times with our Major, whom
we left in the slough of despond, consequent on the coming down
of his rents. Just when things were at their worst, the first
sensible sunbeam of simplicity that ever shone upon land,
appeared in the shape of the practical, easy-working Drainage
Act, an act that has advanced agriculture more than all previous
inventions and legislation put together. But our gallant friend
had his difficulties to contend with even here.
Mr. Bullrush was opposed to it. He was fat and didn’t like
trouble, so he doubted the capacity of such a pocket companion as
a pipe to carry off the superfluous water, then he doubted the
ability of the water to get into the pipe at such a depth, above
all he doubted the ability of the tenants to pay drainage
interests. “How could they if they couldn’t pay their rents?” Of
course, the tenants adopted this view of the matter, and were all
opposed to making what they called “experiences,” at their own
expense; so upon the whole, Mr. Bullrush advised the Major to
have nothing to do with it. It being, however, a case of
necessity with the Major, he disregarded Mr. Bullrush’s advice
which led to a separation, and being now a free agent, he went
boldly at the government loan, and soon scared all the snipes and
half the tenants off his estate. The water poured off in
torrents; the plump juicy rushes got the jaundice, and Mossington
bog, over which the Major used to have to scuttle on foot after
his “haryers,” became sound enough to carry a horse. Then as Mr.
Bullrush rode by and saw each dreary swamp become sound ground,
he hugged himself with the sloven’s consolation that it “wouldn’t
p-a-a-y.” Pay, however, it did, for our Major next went and got
some stout horses, and the right sort of implements of
agriculture, and soon proved the truth of the old adage, that it
is better to follow a sloven than a scientific farmer. He worked
his land well, cleaned it well, and manured it well; in which
three simple operations consists the whole science of husbandry,
and instead of growing turnips for pickling, as his predecessors
seemed to do, he got great healthy Swedes that loomed as large as
his now fashionable daughter’s dresses. He grew as many “bowels”
of oats upon one acre of land as any previous tenant had done
upon three. So altogether, our Major throve, and instead of going
to Boulogne, he presently set up the Cockaded Coach in which we
saw him arrive at Tantivy Castle. Not that he went to a
coachmaker’s and said, “Build me a roomy family coach regardless
of expense,” but, finding that he couldn’t get an inside seat
along with the thirty-six yard dresses in the old chariot, he
dropped in at the sale of the late Squire Trefoil’s effects, who
had given some such order, and, under pretence of buying a
shower-bath, succeeded in getting a capital large coach on its
first wheels for ten pounds,—scarcely the value of the pole.
As a contrast to Henerey Brown and Co.‘s business-like offer for
the farm, and in illustration of the difference between buying
and selling, we append the verbose estimate of this ponderous
affair. Thus it runs—
HENRY TREFOIL, ESQ.
To CHALKER AND CHARGER COACHMAKERS, BY APPOINTMENT, TO THE
EMPEROR OF CHINA, Emperor of Morocco, the King of Oude, the King
of the Cannibal Islands, &c., &c., &c., &c.
_Long Acre, London_.
(Followed by all the crowns, arms, orders, flourish, and flannel,
peculiar to aristocratic tradesmen.)
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Three hundred and ninety pounds! And to think that the whole
should come to be sold for ten sovereigns. Oh, what a falling off
was there, my coachmakers! Surely the King of the Cannibal
Islands could never afford to pay such prices as those! Verily,
Sir Robert Peel was right when he said that there was no class of
tradespeople whose bills wanted reforming so much as coachmakers.
What ridiculous price they make wood and iron assume, and what
absurd offers they make when you go to them to sell!