USES TO WHICH [Chap. 



keep their flesh white, and help to fatten them ; 

 so that they may be fine and fat at two months 

 old, or less. I bought, last year, ten Somerset- 

 shire ewes, which dropped their Iambs in the 

 first week of January. I made a fold on a 

 piece of grass-land near the yard, gave them 

 some white turnips to eat there, and brought 

 them in, at the usual times, to suckle their lambs, 

 and shut them in the house with the lambs all 

 the night. The ewes had whole corn as 

 much as they chose ; and the lambs, besides 

 their milk, had corn-meal given them in little 

 troughs in their own pen. I did not intend 

 to sell the lambs ; but, at about two months old, 

 some of them less than that, I sent four to 

 Smithfield, which were there sold for thirty- 

 six shillings a piece ; and the salesman declared 

 that, for their age, they were the finest and fattest 

 he had ever seen. Away goes all the fuss, then, 

 about " making house-lamb,^' as it is called. 

 With the help of corn, house-lamb will make 

 itself, and corn is the fatting stuff of all the early 

 lamb in America. My ten ewes (one having been 

 blowed by the grass in the meadow, or with slime 

 licked up after the floods) brought seventeen lambs. 

 The mother of two of them died. These two had 

 new cow*s-milk given them three times a day, out 

 of a bottle. They had corn-meal roughly ground 

 to eat all the while or as often as they liked, and 



