MARCH 125 



(ittle progress. Still, the work on the farm went on, barley being 

 drilled whenever the state of the land would allow of it, varied 

 with ploughing and manure carting when it would not. The 

 remainder of the ewes lambed satisfactorily, and we made an 

 average of something over sixty pounds of butter per week. 

 Towards the end of the month, also, we began to chain-harrow 

 the pastures, and this, with the ordinary routine of root carting 

 into the sheds, and stone carting on to the roads in satisfaction of 

 a small contract with the surveyors, makes up a not very interest- 

 ing record. 



March 31. — I returned home yesterday to find the country in 

 very much the same state as I left it nearly a month ago. During 

 this month the weather seems to have been persistently cold. 

 For the first three weeks it was dry. Then came a great three- 

 days' nor'-east gale with a heavy fall of snow — here we had six 

 inches on the level-^foUowed by a cold rain which filled up the 

 dykes and ponds, and not before it was needed. At one house 

 in this neighbourhood the drought had made it necessary to cart 

 water from the lake, and in the villages beyond Bungay known as 

 ' the Parishes,' where the inhabitants depend mainly on shallow 

 ponds for their supply, they were in great straits for water ; indeed, 

 a famine of it was feared. However, this risk is done with for 

 the present ; indeed, the floods have been out on the marshes. 



The snow still lies in the holls, and the meadow^s are more rusty- 

 faced than when I went away. In the sown fields it is difficult to 

 see any change, though the oats drilled for sheep's food have 

 pricked through, and the wheat has perhaps grown a little. The 

 barley does not stir as yet, and Hood has already begun to shake 

 his head over its prospects. He believes that its early seeding (of 

 which I was an advocate) will prove of no advantage, although it 

 went in so well, alleging as his reason that much of the grain 

 will perish in the ground. I, on the other hand, believe that the 

 fate of the crop will depend not upon its early seeding, but upon 

 the weather we experience during the next three months. Barley 



