SSSY.] 



Clironiclcs of a Clay Farm. 



437 



Now this was not a fair question. Spirit-levels (if they had any- 

 meaning or existence at all) were unintelligible, mathematical-look- 

 ing instruments of purely professional nature, only seen (if ever) 

 in the hands of road-surveyors' assistants and people of that sort. 

 They had nothing whatever to do with farming. The question was 

 unfair: it contairaed an ambiguous term. 



Picture to yourself, however, the following conclusion from it. A 

 bleak, foggy, November day ; a long rambling space, marsh or 

 meadow, as you might choose to call it, of some twenty acres in ex- 

 tent, and about the third part of a mile in length, with a nar- 

 row, thick plantation of rushes, sedges, and brook-lime, and such 

 aquatic vegetation, threading its way in one long dank line from 

 end to end, by su:-h fantastic meandering, that it looked as 

 if the hidden channel of choked moisture it concealed had been 

 making a continued series of esperiments from time out of mind in 

 search of an outlet; and after centuries of struggle and disappoint- 

 ment had at length arrived, quite by accident, at a certain point at 

 one end of the meadow — where you might see a pair of high mud 

 boots standing, or rather soaking, with a man in them, peering 

 through a telescope on three legs, as if he was watching for the 

 total eclipse of a small bay that is to be seen — gradually sinking — 

 about fifty yards off, and clutching in his agony a high staff by his 

 side, figured as if for high and low water-mark. 



Presently the Boots and the Telescope, after various ineffectual 

 efforts and heavings, succeed in striking their quarters ; the boy, 

 after sundry spasmodic struggles, to correspond, achieves the same 

 exploit ; and the same scene as before occurs again some fifty yards 



V. Has it ever teea tried witb a Spirit-level I" 



