1857.] Chronicles of a Clay Farm. 493 



that lie so smooth on paper, cost me three times seven months of 

 single-handed fighting against the " Experience^' of a whole neigh- 

 borhood. No hawk in a rookery ever got better beleaguered. " One 

 down t'other come on !" was the one perpetual motto of the tongue- 

 task that awaited me fresh, and fresh, on every side, whichever way 

 I turned. My own work-bailiff (et Tu Brute /) headed the attack 

 within the camp — the traitor ! while a neighboring clergyman led 

 on the foe from without, evidently viewing the heresy in a serious 

 light, and myself as a fit subject for an auto da fe. The conclusion 

 of our last skirmish was too good to be lost to posterity. I entered 

 it verhatim in my farm memoranda. Here it is : 



" But tell me in earnest. Don't you mean to ridge up that field 

 again c 



'• No !" 



'^ What, you mean to lay it flat ?" 



" Yes !" 



'* In the name of Goodness ! Why ?" 



" Because the name of goodness — made it so !" 



If I had suddenly assumed some demoniacal form, and then, leav- 

 ing a train of smoke and brimstone, vanished, with a clap of thunder, 

 from before the eyes of my catechist, I do not think his face would 

 have assumed a greater expression of resourceless and complete 

 astonishment than followed this extraordinary announcement of the 

 reason for a farming operation. Vainly did I attempt to explain in 

 former conversations that when a field is effectually drained, the fur - 

 roivsare undergrovnd^ three feet deep ; and that one of the great ob- 

 jects of breaking the subsoil is to enable the water to go where it 

 was intended to go, DOWNWARD ; that every unevenness of the sur- 

 face was a source of deviation, and therefore of unequal distribu- 

 tion, of that rich food that falls from Heaven — Oxygen and Hydro- 

 gen — commonly called Water ; that on the best land farmed in the 

 best way, furrows are avoided as a nuisance and a loss, except as a 

 mark for measure-work ; and that the object of draining and sub- 

 soiling was — as the object of all Art is — to imitate Nature in her 

 most perfect examples. 



The paradox of yesterday is the truism of to-day. Gas-lamps 

 light up towns, and Great- Westerns cross the Atlantic, though Davy 

 laughed at the one and Lardner at the other. And the principle 

 of the deep drain, which ten years ago the timid theorist dared not 

 assert, for its wild and visionary seeming, is now the substance of 



