A Farmers Notebook 145 



pond used to be where now are lawn, and rose garden, 

 and vineries. Then, you must pull down the trellis 

 and strip off the eglantine, uproot the shrubs, and cast 

 away the gravel, before you can realise the bare 

 thatched house of six or seven rooms as it stood in 

 the beginning of last century. The farm buildings 

 also have been metamorphosed ; though the old wheel 

 granary is still there to remind one of old fashions. 

 The very windmill is a new contrivance for pumping 

 water. A century ago the farmer ground his corn at 

 a watermill by the brook that hurries through the 

 chalky combes. It is standing there yet ; but it has 

 been turned into a couple of cottages. No cart road 

 passes, and the grain to feed it must have been carried 

 on pack-horses. 



Henery Kemble, once the tenant of house, and 

 mill, and farm, acquired his 'British Merlin' in 1711, 

 'being the third year after Bissextile or Leap Year,' and 

 used it for jottings till 1739 ; so that this one almanac 

 served him eight and twenty years. By that time 

 there was no half-inch of paper without its note. The 

 entries, of the most general design, are perhaps for that 

 very reason much more interesting than the contents 

 of a regular account-book. One may easily judge that 

 Henery was a hob-nailed and unlettered Farmer Giles. 

 That his dialect was the broadest Wiltshire is evident 

 from his orthography : ' To noint cows oder ' is one of 

 his recipes ; he writes ' wheats ' for oats, ' ackers ' for 

 acres, ' backon ' for bacon ; and all through his 



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