VEGETABLE AND FRUIT MARKETS. 365 



warm room, and occasionally sprinkle them with water, which 

 will cause them to germinate. As soon as they have sprouted, 

 cover them with some finely-sifted mould ; and the sets will be 

 ready for transplanting at the earliest period. 



Another mode of obtaining early potatoes, not new potatoes, 

 which is, I am told, sometimes practised, is to plant potatoes 

 only so early in the season, as that they shall be about half- 

 grown at the usual time of taking them up. These may be 

 taken up in the autumn, and replaced in earth ; and early in 

 the succeeding spring they may be sold as new potatoes. I 

 should be sorry, by any account of the deceptions and tricks 

 practised in this old country, to be in any degree instrumental 

 in corrupting the simplicity and true-heartedness of any of my 

 own countrymen, who, good souls, may possibly never have 

 heard of any such thing as trick or deception ! but excepting 

 the lie in this case, the potatoes would be quite as good as the 

 half-grown, waxy, new potatoes usually brought to market.* 



Potatoes are sold in the market by weight, fourteen pounds 

 constituting a stone weight ; in Ireland, a stone of potatoes 

 weighs sixteen pounds. In Ireland, the crop is measured by 

 barrels, and an acre of ground is stated to have yielded so many 

 barrels. Then the Irish acre differs very much from the English 

 statute acre, being, I think, the former compared with the latter, 

 as 196 to 121, or nearly 5 to 3. A barrel of potatoes in Ireland 

 may contain five, or only three bushels, and the weight of the 

 bushel of potatoes is not determined, though customarily esti 

 mated at 56 pounds. Few beans are cultivated for the table, 

 excepting the Windsor bean, which is a coarse vegetable ; and a 

 small bean, used like our string beans, and called the French 

 bean. Our Lima bean, and other rich pole-beans, I have not 

 met with. Peas are abundant in market, are brought in early, 

 and continued late, and are of several different kinds, the Charl- 

 ton pea (so called from the town where the earliest peas are 



* Nor. if they should be tempted to practise any such fraud, will I go so far as 

 to recommend them, by way of encouragement or consolation, to read the chapter 

 on Lying, in Paley s Moral Philosophy ; nor, above all, that celebrated treatise of 

 the same exquisite master in casuistry, that perfect anodyne for weak consciences, 

 the Letter on Subscription, in which he shows, with admirable skill, in how many 

 different ways an honest man may subscribe the thirty-nine articles of the church 

 without believing one of them. 



