86 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



Your experience and mine will differ very much if 

 you do not find more expense, and more regret, left 

 behind invariably by an under-done than by an 

 over-done job. "The first expense is the least" in 

 agriculture and in every thing else perhaps, with 

 the old exceptions of Law and Matrimony. 



The first field which I had drained, and to whose 

 chronicled history I must now return, was a tolera- 

 bly rectangular result of what had formerly been 

 two fields, and part of a third ; and consisted, after 

 its enlargement, of about twenty-two acres. One 

 half of this, that is to say, one of the fields as 

 previously fenced, I devoted to a crop of Swedes 

 [turnips. ED.] the first that ever had been heard 

 of on the farm ; (and the last, in the opinion of all 

 surrounding "Wisdom, that ever would be ;) the other 

 part, for reasons in which I suspect you would have 

 acquiesced, had you seen it, I determined to indulge 

 with its old but long-forgotten friend, a bare summer 

 fallow, and with a dose of that same LIME, about 

 whose chemical effects and influences we had so 

 long a soliloquy some time back. Until the end 

 of April all went on alike over the whole of the 

 twenty-two acres. Plowing, scuffling, and leveling 

 were the order of the day, to the great scandal of 

 the high ridges and their admirers ; but on the 



