46 N. H. STATE ACxRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



in these villages for security during tbe troublous times of 

 that fearful period of spiritual and temporal tyranny, the 

 middle ages. They gathered in huts nestling under the 

 shadow of some rocky hill crowned with a monastery or a 

 feudal castle now generally destroyed, or existing only in 

 the mouldering fragments of its donjon-keep, which was 

 too solidly built to yield even to the violence of the French 

 Eevolution. In spite of the inconvenience of so distant a 

 separation between landholder and land, these villages 

 continue to exist, partly from habit, partly from the na- 

 tional passion for social enjoyments, and partly from the 

 inability of the villagers to provide for themselves new and 

 more commodiously situated habitations. Occasionally, 

 indeed, you pass a new chateau or an old castle modern- 

 ized, surrounded with shady groves and llowery gardens, 

 orchards of stiff pear trees or ungraceful prunes, with 

 flocks and herds, teams of horses and oxen, and all the 

 larger and more costly implements of tillage. But these 

 are rare, and it is but seldom that even they are accom- 

 panied with neat and comfortable rural homes for steward 

 and laborers or other dependents. 



The average quantity of ground belonging to the landed 

 proprietors of France is not above five acres to each, and 

 as very many estates greatly exceed this averai^e, very 

 many must fall much below it. Although, as I have al- 

 ready shown, with such small proprietorships the best 

 modes of farming cannot be adopted, yet from the variety 

 of crops, contemporaneous or successive, that may be ob- 

 tained from lands cultivated in the fashion of the garden 

 rather than of the farm, and with the spade more frequently 

 than with the plow, from the care taken to make every 

 inch available, and above all from the fact that the eye and 

 the arm of the owner of tlic soil are l)Oth employed in 

 bringing out its utmost resources, the actual quantity of 

 produce aj)i)licable to human sustenance is great, even as 

 compared with that of the best farmed lands in Europe. 



