AUGUST 315 



This indeed is the case, for in our district I know of two men who 

 a short time ago had little or nothing, but now are farming 

 hundreds of acres of land. How, under the present circumstances 

 of agriculture, they have managed to get their capital together is 

 to me a mystery. I can only suppose that it has been done by 

 shrewd and successful dealing, or possibly such men may be the 

 representatives of others who are willing to entrust them with 

 money. Otherwise, in these days of unprofitable prices, the gulf 

 between a farm employing two horses and one of a thousand acres 

 seems too wide for the most intelligent person to span in the 

 course of a dozen years. 



August 23. To-day the men have been tying up wheat, 

 which is left by the reaper in bundles ready to their hands, and 

 carting pease from No. 37 into the All Hallows stackyard. First 

 the pease, now brown and withered, are raked into lines, where 

 they lie in lumps as they left the scythe, with sufficient space 

 between the lines for a waggon to travel. Then they are loaded 

 on to the waggon, a lump being lifted at each forkful. 



While the carting was in progress I had an opportunity of 

 watching a botfly, or horse-bee, at work. The insect buzzes about 

 the horse, and continually touches it on such portions of its frame 

 as lie within reach of the animal's tongue, for the most part on the 

 inner side of the knees and upon the shoulders. At each touch 

 of its tail there appears a little white egg, which is securely 

 gummed to the extremity of one of the hairs of the horse's hide. 

 How is the hair selected so surely and swiftly, and how is the egg 

 thus fixed to it without fail? This egg the horse when licking 

 himself transfers first to his mouth and thence to his stomach, 

 where it affixes itself to the coats of the membrane, and in due course 

 becomes a bot. In the following spring this bot, having completed 

 its unsavoury development, and being now a maggoty and un- 

 pleasant looking object, passes from the stomach to the earth, 

 where it lies until it is transformed into a fly exactly resembling 

 that which buzzed around the horse last autumn. I succeeded 



