240 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



The wheat being harvested and removed, it is customary to 

 leave the field for the gleaners the women and children of the 

 vicinity. A farmer who does not do this, or who rakes his 

 fields after the removal of the crop, usually renders himself 

 obnoxious to the ill-will of his neighbors. This has now become ; 

 from long use, matter of prescriptive right. It is often, but 

 not always, limited to the wives and children of the laborers in 

 the service of the farmer. This privilege is worth more than 

 one would at first be disposed to consider it, as a single expert 

 gleaner will collect, in the season, three or four bushels. One 

 woman assured me that she had sometimes obtained, by gleaning, 

 to the amount of six bushels, in a year, of wheat ; but I deemed 

 this statement, as perhaps peculiar to the sex, a little poetical. 

 Such results exemplify, in a striking manner, the extraordinary 

 amounts of small savings ; and if, as it is natural to suppose, 

 they correspond to the accumulations of small expenditures, an 

 experienced traveller or resident in England ceases to be sur 

 prised at them. The gleaners in a field, the women and chil 

 dren, from the peach-bloom of two years old to the sallow ness 

 and decrepitude of an old age withered by toil and want, present 

 an interesting spectacle. I am not certain that this form of 

 charity is unobjectionable ; but it is gratifying to contemplate, 

 when a benevolent farmer, by not suffering his reaped fields to be 

 closely raked, himself shares in the pleasures of the gleaners 

 acquisitions, and thus strengthens the bonds of good-will and 

 kindness which connect him with his humble dependents. 



I have gone thus largely into the cultivation of wheat, be 

 cause in England, and perhaps throughout the world, it must be 

 considered, as a bread plant, the most important of all agricul 

 tural products. I myself believe, when all its uses and all the 

 circumstances of its culture are considered, what it requires and 

 what it returns, that Indian corn is more valuable ; but it would 

 be difficult to persuade others of this, who have not been brought 

 up to its use. To the arable farmer here, and in the United 

 States, where it can be grown, wheat must be the great object 

 of attention. 



I suppose there is no country where the average yield of 

 wheat is so large as in England ; and this product has nearly 

 doubled within the last thirty or forty years. I am quite a ware 

 that, in many parts of England, the crops are still small, and do 



