AUTHOR'S NOTE 



AMONGST a great deal of very kindly criticism that has reached 

 him during their publication in serial form (for which hereby he 

 tenders his best thanks) the author of these pages has read one or 

 two notices complaining that they are not sufficiently technical. 

 He wishes to explain, therefore, that he never intended them to 

 be a manual of farming, but rather what their title implies the 

 record of one year of the daily experiences and reflections of an 

 individual farmer. With the many existing and admirable works 

 upon the subject he has neither the desire to enter into com- 

 petition nor, in truth, the scientific and detailed knowledge 

 necessary to such a task. 



Outside of descriptions of rustic scenes and events, which to 

 some quiet minds are often pleasing, any interest that this book may 

 possess, indeed, for the present or for future time, must be due in the 

 main to the facts that it is a picture, or perhaps a photograph, of one 

 facet of our many-sided modern life, and that it mirrors faithfully, 

 if incidentally, the decrepit and even dangerous state of the farming 

 and attendant industries in eastern England during the great agri- 

 cultural crisis of the last decade of the nineteenth century. That 

 is to say, its pages describe those industries with their surroundings 



