540 Chronicles of a Clay Farm. [December, 



thorns, pollards, ash-trees, rabbit-holes, fox-earths, and all, did I 

 hear the exclamation — 



" Well ! this is a wonderful alteration to be sure ; why, I never 

 thought to see it look in thia way ! It's quite a beautiful field now !" 



" One cheer for the Map after all !" quoth I to myself, as at next 

 candle-light, down I sat again over the bird's-eye view of acres 

 which I now began to find were trodden by bipeds and quadrupeds 

 with about equal perception of their plan and bearing. Who would 

 be without an accurate map of his farm, who once knew the cumu- 

 lative triumphs that it brings of skill and headcraft, as lavishly ac- 

 corded in the end, as denied in the outset, by the gregarious juries 

 who sit in judgment on his acts ? 



Down went fence after fence ! each with precisely the same pro- 

 logue and epilogue of blame and praise ; for all the successful issues in 

 the world never stop or stay that rampant, " inconvertible" thing, 

 criticism ; that battery of inextinguishable pop-guns that is never 

 silenced or taken by assult. Down however went the fences not- 

 withstanding : and certainly, without reference to any of the more 

 subterraneous improvements, of drainage, cultivation or otherwise? 

 the mere accession of business-like appearance to the farm when 

 denuded of its miles of jungle, was what Dame Quickly would call 

 "a thing to thank God upon." 



It would be a difficult but an interesting task to make out a cal- 

 culation of the economy per acre, of the riddance of these hideous 

 and useless strongholds of roots, weeds, birds, and vermin that afflict 

 the farms of merry England. Unproductive in themselves of any 

 thing that is good — for even the timber they contain is very rarely 

 so— they are equally an obstruction to the plow that toils for bread, 

 and the eye that wanders for beauty. Far be it from the old Chron- 

 icler to depreciate the " tangled copse," or the " boundless contigu- 

 ity of shade " that glides the early remembrance of some, and the 

 imagination of all ; that lives in the tasteful pages of Evelyn and 

 Prick, or in the " charming bits " of Wilson or Xasmyth ; but 

 'where can be the pictorial or moral beauty of a great, crooked, arti- 

 ficial mound surmounted by a dead fence serrated into gaps and 

 " raspers," or at the best, hogged into dreary uniformity that cuts 

 the blessed land-scape from the eye, by a man-made barrier of stakes 

 and " witherings." " Take way the curtain that I may see the pic- 

 ture" might any mortal say, who, from his first lessons in Geography 

 had learnt that a man six feet high has a sort of physical right to a 



