234 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



cut seven days, others fourteen, before it would be perfectly ripe. 

 I do not hold that the middle path is always the preferable course ; 

 but there may be an error, as my own experience satisfies me, in 

 cutting grain too early, as well as in cutting too late. In one 

 respect, the farmers here have a great advantage on their side, in 

 the number of laborers they can, at any time, bring into the fields ; 

 so that the largest crops may be cut and gathered in a compara 

 tively very short time. 



Wheat here is seldom put in barns ; it is generally made into 

 stacks. Staddles are formed of wood, in some cases the feet 

 are of cast iron, about eighteen inches or two feet in height; 

 sometimes the frame is of iron as well as the feet. On these the 

 grain is stacked with the most extraordinary neatness, and well 

 thatched. In this way, it will keep any length of time. When 

 placed on iron staddles, the stack is inaccessible to rats. In parts of 

 Cambridgeshire where the stacks were placed upon the ground, 

 I found them plastered with lime-mortar, about two feet from the 

 ground up, and whitewashed, which was regarded as a preven 

 tive against vermin. The stacks, in general, are made round ; but 

 this is objected to in Norfolk county, where the stacks are made 

 long, as being made at less expense and more conveniently re 

 moved, in parts, for threshing. The stacks, generally, are calcu 

 lated to contain from eighty to one hundred bushels; but, in 

 Lincolnshire, I found them of an immense size at least twenty- 

 two feet in height, and more than fifty feet in length. In Nor 

 folk, I found stacks of grain more than seventy feet long, and sur 

 rounding the homestead like a vast encampment. On one farm 

 in the Lothians, I counted sixty-seven staddles ; and more than 

 those were filled every year. Many of the large stacks which I 

 saw were estimated to contain from eight hundred to one thousand 

 bushels each. The neatness with which a skilful t hatcher will, 

 form, and finish, and frequently ornament, his stacks, is surpris 

 ingly beautiful ; and the conscious dignity with which one of 

 these large farmers displays his magnificent stack-yard, and leads 

 you about his premises, is sufficiently to be admired, and certainly 

 not by me to be condemned. At the example farm at Whit field, 

 Gloucestershire, there was a small railroad from the stack-yard to 

 the threshing-floor, by which the sheaves were very conveniently 

 transported. The great advantage of stacking grain, over storing 

 it in barns, is, that it is not so liable to injury from heat ; but the 



