Gbnbbal Preface. v 



cut with shears and every other mark of skill and care 

 strike the eye at Famham, and become fainter and 

 fainter as you go from it in every direction. I have 

 had, besides, great experience in farming for several 

 years of late j for, one man will gain more knowledge 

 in a year than another will in a life. It is the taste for 

 the thing that really gives the knowledge. 



9. To this taste, produced in me by a desire to imi- 

 tate a father whom I ardently loved, and to whose very 

 word I listened with admiration, I owe no small part 

 of my happiness, lor a greater proportion of which 

 very few men ever had to be grateful to God. These 

 pursuits, innocent in themselves, instructive in their 

 very nature, and always tending to preseWe health, 

 have a constant, a never-failing source, of recreation 

 to me; and, which I count amongst the greatest of 

 their benefits and blessings, they have always, in my 

 house, supplied the place of the card-table, the dice- 

 box, the chess-board and the lounging bottle. Time never 

 hangs on the hands of him, who delights in these ur 

 suits, and who has books on the subject to read. Even 

 when shut up within the walls of a prison, for having 

 complained thatEnghshmen had been flogged in the heart 

 of England under a guard of German Bayonets and 

 Sabres ; even then, I found in these pursuits a source 

 of pleasure inexhaustible. To that of the whole of 

 our English books on these matters, I then added the 

 reading of all the valuable French books ; and I then, 

 for the first time, read that Book of all Books on hus- 

 bandry, the work of Jethro Tull, to the principles of 

 whom I owe more thaa to all my other reading and 



