7 3 A FARMER'S YEAR 



most profitable bit of farming that ever I did, and I am always 

 proud to remember that I once earned 240?., or the half of it, by 

 the labour of my own hands. 



To return from Rooi Point to Bedingham. The drains having 

 been cleared, the modus operandi is as follows : First one man 

 goes down the line digging out a spit of soil with his draining-spade, 

 a narrow, heavy tool furnished with a projecting bar upon which 

 the foot is set. It takes three cuts of this spade, each of them 

 driven home up to the projecting bar, to loosen the spit, that 

 with a slow heave of the labourer's body and a quick movement of 

 his arm is then thrown out to one side. After him comes his 

 mate, armed with a still narrower tool, who, in like fashion, cuts 

 out and removes a deeper spit. This work is even harder than 

 that of the first man, since No. 2 is now digging in primaeval clay, 

 which at Bedingham is about the toughest stuff that I ever saw. 

 If anyone doubts it, let him get some upon his boots on a wet day 

 and then try to get it off again. When a suitable length of drain 

 has been done out thus to the depth of a double spit, No. 2 man 

 takes another instrument called a scoop, something like a trowel 

 with the handle set more or less at right angles, and with it cleans 

 the bottom of the drain, into which it exactly fits, till it is quite 

 neat and level. Then, having first removed with his fingers any 

 little clods or other obstructions that may have fallen into it, he 

 lifts bushes from the heaps that are laid at intervals along the 

 course of the drain, and packs a sufficient quantity of them into 

 the cutting, thrusting them down to the narrow bottom of the V 

 by means of a forked stick. These bushes, by the way, must not 

 be mere hedge trimmings, but good stout stuff of five or six years' 

 growth, otherwise they will rot long before their time. 



When the bushes have been thrust home clods of clay are 

 thrown loosely into the cutting to fill it up, and practically the drain 

 is finished. These drains, by the way, are generally cut about 

 six or eight yards apart. They do not, for the most part, run 

 direct into the receiving ditch, but into another drain drawn at 

 right angles, which is called a ' lead,' and in the case of tile drains 



