MAY 185 



venient. Hood sold the remainder of my wheat about sixty 

 coomb at forty-nine shillings the quarter. It has been a little 

 higher, and will very likely be higher again, but in such a tricky 

 and artificial market as that which exists for corn I think it best 

 to take what I can get and be thankful. 



To-day we are baulking up the swede land and gilling trees 

 from the Bath Hills. Certainly a timber gill is a wonderfully 

 well-designed though a very simple implement. It is worked 

 thus. First the gill, which is a kind of very high-wheeled cart, 

 made to carry its load beneath the axle instead of above it, is run 

 over the tree to be removed. Then the horse, which drags it by 

 means of chains fastened to hooks at the end of shafts, or 

 sometimes to a pole resembling that which in Africa we call a 

 dissel-boom, is taken off, and the shafts are thrust backwards till 

 they stand pointing to the sky. Next the chains are made fast 

 round the bole of the tree and drawn up taut to the arched and 

 ironed timber axle. Then, if the load be moderate, one, or if 

 heavy, two men, with the help of the leverage afforded by the 

 length of the shafts, drag them down, and the great tree swings up 

 from the ground. Or should it be too weighty for their efforts, the 

 aid of a horse is called in. Next, the load having been arranged so 

 that it balances, the hooks are slipped through the eye, and away 

 walks the horse, dragging after him a baulk of timber that in many 

 cases one would have believed to be quite beyond his strength. 



To-day I was obliged to do some canvassing, a task which I 

 particularly detest. I think that it is hateful to ask anybody for 

 anything, votes not excluded, more especially if the asker chances to 

 be in a position of authority or advantage towards the person asked. 

 It is this wholesale begging, and all the humbug attendant on it, 

 that makes standing for Parliament so peculiarly arduous an 

 undertaking. I cannot conceive why, with our present enlarged 

 electorate, personal canvassing is allowed to remain legal, except it 

 be from the idea that the party which proposed or carried its 

 abolition would suffer at the polls, as the institution is believed to 

 be popular among the canvassed. Surely the facts of the case 



