536 Chronicles of a Clay Farm. [December, 



CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



CHAPTER VI.—" CALX"— AND RECALCITRATION, 



A LONG, long time — what a dreary time — is winter ! Well may all 

 Christendom have lent its comfortable efforts through ages past, 

 with a long and a strong pull and a pull altogether, to give a point 

 and a zest, and a time of almost legislated conviviality, in the Christ- 

 mas fireside, and a good fellowship, by way of indoor barricade, a 

 sort of jovial rebellion ; against the long despotism of Jack Frost. 

 It is hard to convey an adequate idea of the bounding pleasure with 

 which — after watching, month after month unchanged, the rugged, 

 uncouth results of that piece of autumn workmani^hip lately describ- 

 ed — I saw at last the wholesome-looking combination of such a het- 

 erogeneous variety of earths that had lain ice-bound, as if for per- 

 petual and stereotyped ugliness, now melting down, under the genial 

 influences of spring, and that blessed pair of harrows into what, old 

 Evelyn must have especially had in his eye when he talked of " a 

 roscid and fertile mold." 



" Easy work it is to preach about farming experiments," thought 

 I to myself, as I wandered in the gloomy evenings of December and 

 January, among the square clods that lay exumed upon the surface 

 of the field, with the spade-mark inscribed in frozen obduracy upon 

 their sides, like the blocks in the quarries of Syracuse, dated with 

 the tool-marks of twenty centuries ago ! " Easy work to preach ex- 

 periments, that take a year to make, and another to judge of, and 

 another, and perhaps another still, to see the whole result of — to 

 men whose ' threescore years and ten ' were hardly a sufficient le^se 

 in which to scrape together a dozen facts beyond what their fothers 

 knew ! A pretty homily upon Leases there lies in these clods that 

 have been keeping sentry here these three months, while the Manu- 

 facturer has worn a steam-engine from new to old, and the trader 

 has turned over half his capital, and briskly put in a fresh stock 

 of 'Spring Fashions.' Tn the name of common sense, that useful 

 'raw material ' which England has as plentiful as Coal and Iron — 

 what dead carcase has been chained to this living art of Arts, to 

 clog its progress and to rot its vital powers, by adding the curse of 

 Insecurity of Tenura to its already arduous and time-and-patience- 



