430 Report on the Exhibition and Tried of Implements 



responsibilities, leaves behind it some experiences, I avail myself 

 of tlie opportunity of noticing: one or two points connected with 

 its discharge, which appear to merit the consideration of a Society 

 desirous of carrying out in the most efficient manner objects so 

 intrinsically and nationally valuable as those which are committed, 

 for the time being, to the stewards and the judges at the annual 

 meetings in July. It has long been matter of remark, and is a 

 constantly felt inconvenience and even hardship by the judges, that 

 at each town in succession where the meeting is held, each equally 

 crowded — and elevated, amongst other excitements, to the highest 

 possible appreciation of the value of a night's lodging measured 

 in the minutest scale of accommodation — they arrive by the train 

 with less direction than a ticketed parcel (exemplifying that maxim 

 in railroad economics that passengers are the only goods that load 

 and unload themselves), and strangers to the place fi'om first to 

 last, they find themselves each paired in duty with some other 

 judge, wlio has been launched, perhaps, from an opposite line of 

 rail, upon a distant quarter of the town, and has there dropped at 

 once into like unrepose and extortion. They are thus separated 

 after their days' duties are over, at the very periods most favour- 

 able for conference on their awards and the preparation of their 

 joint Reports ; or by a still worse fate they find themselves con- 

 gregated at some noisy overcrowded inn, where study and seclu- 

 sion are impossible. The busiest bee makes but little honey 

 during swarming-time, stunned and distracted by the tympano- 

 clastic influence that custom superadds to honour such occasions, 

 and without any practicable centre of coherence to resort to ; and 

 it is not much to be wondered at if, under such circumstances, 

 the senior steward, instead of receiving the judges' valuable 

 Reports fresh from the vivid pen of each day's impression and 

 experience, has the mortification to find the great meeting dis- 

 persed, July gone — and how many months more shall 1 say ? 

 — before that which is never so good, never so easy ar/ain, is 

 at length reduced to formal shape, but never to the first condition 

 and quality that it wore in embryo while the little attendant 

 incidents of thought and circumstance were fresh upon the 

 memory. 



Surely out of the thousands who subscribe to the invaluable 

 objects of the Royal Agricultural Society of England in its Meet- 

 ings, there are few who would hold the money ill laid out that 

 provided the judges of the annual shows a central and private 

 place of business and rest, secured beforehand, and adapted to 

 the useful and necessary object which for the time being unites 

 them as one body, and for some purposes (as the reapers, steam- 

 ploughs, &c.), as one " bench." 



The same remark applies in the case of the stewards themselves,/ 



