"TALPA" LOQUITUR. 177 



the reiterated monument of human folly, dotting 

 the road, like milestones. 



It is very fine, no doubt, to connect one's own 

 small-scale improvements, after this fashion, with 

 the history of the Great and the Dead, to whom life 

 was one conflict with ridicule and contempt a 

 history the most aifectingly interesting perhaps 

 the most important that is left to us ; but after all, 

 the grandeur or pettiness of the scale does not alter 

 the argument. And when I had listened for half an 

 hour to Mr. Greening discoursing of Guano and 

 Superphosphate, in as easy and as matter-of-fact a 

 style as if he had regularly carted them out of his 

 farm-yard on to the turnips any time this fifty years, 

 (though he still called it Gu-anner, and would not 

 have it, at any price, as a word of two syllables,) I 

 could not help mentally amusing myself with think- 

 ing of the time when he used to poke every im- 

 aginable jocularity at me for "sowing the sawdust" 

 "wheel-barrow farming," "pocket-dung-carts," and 

 a whole heap of good sayings which, duly noted 

 down on my part, made my chronicle of that date a 

 complete glossary of farming-witticisms : and curious 

 it was to see how the memory of former incredulities 

 had passed away from him. My deepest drains 

 were no longer deep ; my largest fields no longer 



