88 NOTES ON FIELDS AND CATTLE. 



your neighbour's adjoining fields are not soaked and 

 sour with redundant moisture, for your flock might 

 then inhale the poison through the fence. There 

 are several " commons " in this neighbourhood over 

 which hundreds of wild sheep ramble. Of these 

 there is one never free from rot : there are others 

 that have never known it. On that where it is 

 found, there are several springs, not rising to a clear 

 head, but absorbed around into the spongy ground. 

 On the lower side, locked in by the meeting of three 

 sloping hills, there is a lake which, full in winter, 

 drains off nearly dry during the summer months. 

 The skater, as he glides over its frozen surface, sees 

 below, not as in Lough Neagh the towers of other 

 days, but a gay luxuriance of coarse grass, which, 

 as the waters shrink favente Favonio, becomes a 

 coating of corrupted matter ; the whole length and 

 breadth of which is laden with deadly malaria, as 

 fatal to the sheep as the Pontine marshes to the 

 human subject. To the border of this pool, thus 

 festering with slimy and decaying vegetation, should 

 the sheep advance to drink, it is struck at once — an 

 instant does it — one sniff will suffice. Only yester- 

 day, after I had written the above, I came accident- 

 ally across the following passage in Whiteside's 

 " Italy," borrowed by him from a work of Mr. 

 Spalding's, and which I quote in turn as supple- 

 mental to my own idea. 



After stating that the Romans themselves take no 

 part in gathering the fruits of the Campagna, he 

 continues : u The peasants from the mountains, the 

 Abruzzesi (male and female), who come down in 



