TRAXSACTIONS. 45 



agricultural impleraeuts. He cannot spare ground for the 

 growth of fuel, underdrain his land, or secure it Ly a per- 

 manent and substantial fence, and he has too small au 

 interest in internal improvements to make him an able or 

 a willing contributor to roads and other facilities of travel 

 and transport. He must live, therefore, in such hovel as 

 his slender means enable him to own or rent, at so great a 

 distance perhaps from his narrow territory, that half his 

 day must be spent in going and returning between his 

 dwelling and his place of labor; his ground must be pain- 

 fully tilled with spade and mattock ; the extra aid he may 

 require at critical seasons must depend on the uncertain 

 chances of an exchange of labor; the necessities of his 

 household or the urgency of the tax-gatherer may compel 

 him to sacrifice his own harvest, while earning a hard 

 penny in securing that of his wealthier neighbor ; and 

 whatever he gathers at last must be sold on the spot at 

 an inadequate price, or transported to market or to his 

 garner upon his own shoulders or those of his wife and 

 children. 



In such districts, therefore, you sec no flocks of sheep 

 or herds of cattle, but here and • there, nibbling by the 

 road-side' or along the lands, two or three or perhaps a 

 dozen ewes kept from straying by dog and shepherd, or a 

 single cow with a rope about her horns held by a woman 

 who divides her time between tending an infant or knit- 

 ting a stocking, and checking the obstinate propensity of 

 her beast to yield to the temptations of cabbage and 

 clover and trespass upon that wliich is her neighbor's. 



At distant intervals you pass hamlets or clusters of lit- 

 . tie huts with thatched and moss-grown roofs, thickly plant- 

 ed on narrow and crooked streets, with a picturesque old 

 gothic church, and a few venerable trees, the benefits of 

 ■whose shade have saved their spreading boughs from the 

 process of lopping, to which their fellows arc elsewhere 

 subjected. The rural population was originally collected 



