quence, by becoming yellow, and sharp-pointed at the blade. By and by, however, the Yankee comes with his plough; and it would frighten an English farmer out of his senses to see how he goes on, swearing at the horses, and tearing about the ground, and tumbling it up against the plants; but, at any rate, moving it all pretty deeply, somehow or other. I have seen them do this when the tassel was nearly at its full height, and when the silk was appearing from the ears. One rule is invariable; that is, that if the corn be not ploughed at all there will be no crop; there will be tassel, and the semblance of ears; but (upon ordinary land, at least), there will be no crop at all.'

The truth is, that though we agree with the author in esteeming the importance and utility of his discovery at a great price, we are constrained to confess, that it is his digression from the main topic, which has given us perhaps, a livelier pleasure than the prospect of the land of plenty, into which this country is to be metamorphosed; and that had he, like other writers on similar subjects, stuck to the mere didactic, perhaps we should never have read his book, certainly never taken in it the interest of a reporter upon its contents. His observations on rural economy bring to our mind so many pleasing images; the moving pictures he sets before us, outshine Morland in the picturesque, and even greater and more famous masters than he, in their living truth, their sweet-smelling freshness. Of this kind of digression in this volume, the eulogy on the gentle and patient ox gave us the most genuine delight. Perhaps he is unjust to the horse, but we must remember, "he babbles of green fields," and "his talk is of bullocks." This must be his excuse, if the man who can write so beautifully stands in need of excuse the extract which follows is a part of the passage alluded too.

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The ox is the natural assistant of man in the labours of the field. So he was in the days of Moses, and throughout the whole of the periods of the transactions of which the Bible is a history. We read in the Bible of war-horses; of horses drawing chariots; but we never find an allusion to horses employed in the tillage of the land; for which, by their gentleness, by the nature of the food which they require, by their great docility, oxen seem to have been formed by nature. When I was in Long Island, I had a pair of large oxen and a pair of small ones; and, from that time I have been astonished at their not being more in use in England. If you want to do a very long day's work in summer time, it is necessary to rest in the middle of the day, and particularly if the weather be hot. What a clutter there is with horses in this case. They must be brought

into the stable, rubbed down, fed at manger, and taken out again to the field, be the distance what it may; an ox is uncollared or unyoked, turned into the nearest field which has no crop in it; and, perhaps you may let him loose in the field where you are at plough, and he there, either on the unploughed ground, or round the hedges, gets him a luncheon, and is ready for you when you come back. The docility of oxen is beyond belief to those who have not been in the habit of using them. My man in Long Island, used, in summer time, to go out with his yoke and his bows just at break of day; that is to say, as soon as he could see the oxen at fifty or sixty yards from him; for there it is a great thing to get the main of the work done before ten o'clock, and after five, in order to avoid the burning heat of the day. He generally found the oxen lying down, in which respect again they were so much better than the dainty and capricious horse, which will sometimes stand upon his legs, even for a week together. As soon as the man got a sight of the oxen, for the space was large, he used to call out Haw, boys. At the second call, somewhat more loud than the former, the oxen used to rise up and look at him, and then look at one another. When he approached them near enough for his words to be distinctly heard, he used to call out, "come under," upon which the oxen began to walk off slowly towards him. The next words were, "Come under, I TELL ye," pronounced in a very commanding and even angry tone, upon which the oxen set off to him at full trot, bringing their heads up close to his body, and putting the yokes round their necks, each fastened at the top with a little piece of wood, away he walked, and they after him, into the field, where a single plough-chain hooked on to a ring in the yoke, sent the plough along in a minute. There are two objections stated to the use of oxen. It is said, that they go slowly; and so they ought; and, on the finest arable farms that I ever saw, and I believe are the finest in the world, I mean, in the vales of Wiltshire, the horses go as slowly as foot can fall. It is the history of the tortoise and the hare; the movements must be slow in such a case; and, if the time be well husbanded, slow movements are the best.'

How calm, how tranquillizing is this picture of peaceful labour, and how consolatory the cheerful submission of the gentle animal to his useful task. Quite in another strain is our author's ridicule of the farrier, his abuse of the carter, and his triumphant enumeration of the ailings of the poor horse. In true homely English humour the Registrar has no competitor living and it is much rather to the buoyancy of his imagination than to the soundness of his tenets that he owes his widely-extended fame.

There is, however, as much truth as humour in the following portion of the section we have already in part transcribed.

One of the great plagues of horses is the blacksmith, who may almost be looked upon as an inmate of the farm-yard, acting as he generally does, in the double capacity of horse-shoe-maker and farrier, in the former of which, he, several times in every year, actually makes business for himself in the latter. In short, this may be called an everlasting visitor; and, being a prowler about from place to place, he brings all the news regularly, once or twice a week; and gathers a goodly group about him at the stable-door. Then, just at the time when you want the team to go out, a horse has got a shoe loose; he must be taken to the blacksmith, at perhaps a mile distance; or the blacksmith must be brought; and he, unluckily, is gone to another farm. How often does it happen (and every farmer will say it) for a waggon or cart, which ought to be off before day-light, to be kept at home till eight o'clock, waiting for the operations of the blacksmith! How often does it happen for a harvest-waggon, to stand still for hours from the same cause! With oxen you have none of these plagues, and none of the heavy expenses that accompany them. Third: there is the farrier, with his balls, and his drinks, and his salve, and his tow, and all his tinkerings about day after day, week after week, and month after month. There is the grease, and the pole-evil, and the glanders, and the strangles, and the fret, and the coughs, and the staggers, and the botts, and various other nasty and troublesome diseases. The ox knows none of these: he sets them all, BOTT SMITH'S name-sakes and the whole, completely at defiance. If he get lamed by any means, you have only to let him lay in a rough field or a meadow and rest until he be well; and if the lameness be incurable, still he will fat with very little trouble, and will, nineteen times out of twenty sell for more than he cost. The farrier's bill is a manuscript of considerable length, winding up with a decent allegation in figures. You will find not a single ball omitted; and, generally speaking, I say generally speaking, the cost of the farrier is far beyond the good that he does; and in innumerable cases, you have at last to send the horse to the dog-kennel. Fourth: a personage coming still more home to you; I mean the carter. A carter is the sole master of the horses with which he goes; and, in nine cases out of ten, he is, as far as concerns them and their labours, pretty nearly the master of their owner. He must have his way pretty much as to quantity and quality of food, as to hours of labour, and as to various other things, in which, if you do not give way to him, you must make up your

mind to get rid of him; and, even then, you only exchange one sort of half-master for another. If you be peremptory in your commands to him, and insist upon such or such a quantity of work being done, in such or such a space of time, and also insist upon having your own way with regard to the food of the horses, he has a way of making their rough coats and bare bones convince you, that he understood these matters a great deal better than you. With oxen you have no part of this everlasting plague. They want neither currying, nor rubbing; they want no straw cut up for chaff, they want no stables to be cleaned out, once or twice a day; they want no careful racking up by candle-light; they want no man in the stable, two hours before it is time to turn out to work: turned into the field or the meadow, or turned to the cribs in their yard, they are ready at day-light to receive the collar or the yoke, and they are at work without any previous ceremony. The carter gets drunk, or quits you, which he legally may, in the middle of harvest, though he has been living upon you all the winter; he may do this legally if he be fired with the love of fame to be acquired in his Majesty's service. With oxen you set both the carter, and this most injurious law at defiance.

The first operation on the grown plants is that of topping; this is the planter's hay harvest; the tops serve for chaff, for dry food instead of hay, for fodder. They are cut off above the ears, collected by a cart going along the intervals or roads, and stacked for winter use. Mr. Cobbett's harvest of tops was not so successful as it might have been; this arose from his absence at the favourable opportunity for stacking: he was seduced he says to Penenden Heath by the ecstatic delight of hearing Mr. Shiel, and of having ocular and auricular demonstration of the surprising fact that a man can be heard in a northwest direction to the distance in a straight line of more than thirty miles, which the same words coming from the same lips (or words said to be the same) cannot be heard at more than thirty inches towards the south-east." However", he concludes "the delight arising from the discovery was not and is not for a moment to be put in competition with the saving of a crop of corn-tops."

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The ears of corn are stripped off when the grain is hard, and carried in carts to the barns, and placed in corn cribs adapted for the purpose. The grains are taken off the pithy cylinder on which they grow, by being rubbed or scraped on a piece of iron: in America a bayonet (a weapon called by the Yankees Uncle George's toasting fork) is invariably used for the purpose: the cylinder, now bared of its grain, is called the cobb. The delicate leaves by which the ear is enveloped is, as has been mentioned,

called the husk; it may be used for the stuffing of beds: Mr. Cobbett has converted some of it even into paper, by which, as he says, he hopes to propitiate Doctor Black, the feelosophers, and the admirers of the march of intellect: he has actually printed the title page and contents of the present book on paper manufactured from it, and tolerably good kind of paper it seems to be, with a tawny tinge, perhaps, but altogether certainly a curiosity. The cobb is sometimes cut up for chaff and is also used for corks. "Never did I see," says our author, " any other corks in a farm-house in America: the Yankee puts it into his bottle to carry drink to his work in the fields: the wife puts it into her bottles of various sorts, which hold the spirits, the cherry-brandy, and other such things, calculated to lighten the head and to cheer the heart of man and woman."

In Mr. Cobbett's sanguine temperament the uses to which the grain is applicable are wonderfully numerous and important. Under the heads of pig-feeding, sheep-feeding, and cow-feeding, poultry-feeding, and horse-feeding, he gives an account of his own experiments and observations. They are too minutely expounded, for us to do more than refer to them as encouragements to examination of the thriving condition of the American horses Cobbett gives an example in his amusing vein, and by a trial made at his own farm in Long Island, he proved that neither their strength nor speed deteriorates on Corn.

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When in Long Island, I lived twenty miles from New York; I kept, as is the fashion of the farmers in the island, a pair of horses to drive in a light waggon with a pole; and though this waggon (the nicest thing in this world) is used for all purposes upon the farm, not excepting stone cart, and timber cart (for the sides taken off it becomes a little timber carriage); though it be very strong, it is, owing to its being made of locust, white oak and hickory wood, in every part, of size so small, a really light affair, not exceeding in weight the common rattling English post-chaise. This waggon and pair is kept by every farmer of substance, for carrying things to market especially; and, not unfrequently (twice every week in the year at the least), taking the wife out a visiting, as before mentioned, to take a comfortable cup of tea and a gossip. My horses went very frequently to New York, and were much about on a par, in point of strength and swiftness, with those of the general run of my neighbours, who, amidst all their long-faced gravity and absence of ambition and rivalship, have, nevertheless, this one species of folly; that, in going upon the road, it is looked upon as a sort of slur on one, if another pass him, going in the same direction; and this folly prevails to as great a degree as amongst our break-neck