VIII. 

 "TRUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A" MARL-PIT. 



AMONG the legacies which the wisdom and labors of 

 antiquity had bequeathed to the Clay Farm and its 

 cultivators, one of the most curious and truly puzzling 

 was a quantity of Marl-pits. In every field of five, 

 or six acres there was a great yawning "Pit," deep 

 enough to drown the weathercock on a church steeple, 

 and wide enough to accommodate the church as well : 

 and when the broad hedgerows were stocked away, 

 (and, in good truth, my two first winters made 

 strange havoc among those mounds of aggravating 

 width and crookedness which had separated field 

 from field, like so many lines of fortification tin-own 

 up between hostile encampments,) nothing can be 

 imagined more absurd than the effect of these deep 

 wounds disclosed upon the bosom of mother earth, 

 and lying thick and threefold in the fields, as now 

 enlarged to an average of about twenty acres each. 



