WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 139 



II. 



Every day something new is introduced into farming, 

 and yet the old things are not driven out. Every one 

 knows that steam is now used on the farm for ploughing 

 and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead, 

 and one would have thought that by this time it would 

 have superseded all other motive powers. Yet this very 

 day I counted twenty great cart-horses at work in one 

 ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to 

 harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nine- 

 teen were dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of 

 limb, standing high up above the level surface of the 

 open field, great towers of strength, almost prehistoric 

 in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great 

 cannon up into a battery on the heights. The day be- 

 fore, passing the same farm — it was Sunday — a great 

 bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in a corner 

 of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, 

 and the sun shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had 

 been brushed, the long black mane hung over the arch- 

 ing neck, the large dark eyes looked at us so quietly — a 

 real English picture. The black funnel of the steam- 

 engine has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the 

 fields They have been there for centuries, and there 

 they stay ; the notched, broad wheel of the steam-plough 

 has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth. New 

 things come, but the old do not go away. One life is 

 but a summer's day compared with the long cycle of 

 years of agriculture, and yet it seems that a whole storm, 

 as it were, of innovations has burst upon the fields ever 

 since I can recollect, and, as years go, I am still in the 



