144 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



The cottages were nearly all of the timber and noggin 

 walls I have described as common at Chester, covered with 

 thick thatched roofs, with frequent and different-sized dor 

 mers, often with bow-windows, porches, well-houses, &c., of 

 unpainted oak or of rustic work (boughs of trees with the 

 bark on), broad latticed windows opening on hinges, a profu 

 sion of creeping vines on trellises, and often covering all the 

 walls and hanging down over the windows, little flower gar 

 dens full of roses, and wallflowers, and violets, and migno 

 nette, enclosed in front by a closely-trimmed hedge of yew, 

 holly, or hawthorn, sometimes of both the latter together, 

 and a nicely-sloped bank of turf between it and the road. 



A cut from a sketch I made of one of the largest houses 

 will be found on page 207. An intelligent labouring man 

 talked with me while I was drawing it, and said it was the 

 residence of the schoolmaster, and the village school was kept 

 in it. The main part (which was covered with our American 

 ivy) was over three hundred years old ; a part of the wing 

 was modern. 



This labourer had been digging drains in the vicinity. He 

 said the practice was to make them from 18 to 36 inches 

 deep, and from 5 to 7 yards apart, or : in the old buts &quot; 

 &quot;The buts?&quot; &quot;Ay, the buts.&quot; He meant what we some 

 times call the &quot; bouts&quot; (turnabouts ?) or furrows between the 

 lands in ploughing, which here are often kept unaltered for 

 generations for surface drainage, and, oddly enough, consider 

 ing the many manifest inconveniences of retaining them, 

 as we were often told, on account of the convenience of 

 measuring or dividing fields by them (as our farmers are 

 often guided in their sowing by the lands, and estimate areas 

 by counting the panels offence). Pipe-tiles, such as are being 

 now introduced with us, an inch or an inch and a half in di 

 ameter (without collars), were laid in the drains to conduct 



