122 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



The improvement is expected to be amply remunerative in the 

 end, and it is one of the unlooked-for results of free trade, which 

 are to be met with in every part of the country, that a landlord 

 is compelled by circumstances, various in kind, to improve the 

 neglected portions of his estate, and which, without such impel- 

 ling cause, might have long lain unproductive. Every such im- 

 provement is not merely an addition to the arable land of the 

 kingdom, but it becomes also an increased source of employment 

 to the laborer." 



I witnessed immense injury done to turnip crops by shooting 

 over them, in Scotland. I was once visiting a tenant-farmer 

 there, when for a whole half day a " gentleman" with three dogs, 

 was trampling down his Swedes, not once going out of the field. 

 He was a stranger, having the permission of the owner of the 

 property to shoot over it, probably, and the farmer said it would 

 do no good to remonstrate ; he would only be laughed at and 

 insulted. 



We passed near a rookery, and the keeper was good enough 

 to shoot one of the rooks for us to look at. It was a shorter- 

 winged and rather heavier bird than our crow, with a larger head 

 and a peculiar thick bill. At a distance the difference would not 

 be readily distinguished. The caw was on a lower note, and 

 more of a parrot tone, much like the guttural croak of a fledgling 

 crow. The keeper did not confirm the farmer's statement of 

 their quality for the table. When they were fat they made a 

 tolerable pie only, he said, not as good as pigeons. The rookery 

 wa?, as we have often seen it described, a collection of crows'-like 

 nests among the tops of some large trees. 



We turned off from the river a little way to look at Eccleston, 

 a village on the border of the park, and one of the prettiest we 

 saw in England. 



The cottages were nearly all of the timber and noggin walls I 



