A Farmer’s Life 
foaling. The premium, 19s. 6d., did not insure 
the foal. It would have cost £3 to do that. 
Beyond the boulder wall, on slightly higher 
ground, was a fair field of rye, just turning into 
ear. Seen from our lower ground it showed a 
tender cool green against the evening sky. 
We leant over a little wicket gate to look at it. 
“Is the straw valuable?” I asked. ‘“‘ It should 
be,” the farmer said, ‘‘ but that shows ye where 
we are hit. At Aldershot Camp they use nothing 
but moss-litter now, so there is no demand for 
Straw there. And then, where these gentlemen 
keep motor-cars ’’ (motor-cars were a compara- 
tively new thing) “they don’t keep horses, and 
there’s no bedding wanted for a motor.” ‘“‘ And 
no manure coming from them,” I suggested. My 
uncle assented. ‘There too the farmers were 
sufferers, he said. Moss-litter made useless 
manure, and not only at Aldershot Camp but in 
London too three-parts of the remaining stables 
were being supplied with moss-litter. . . . I was 
shown some of the bad hay from a wet summer 
two years previously. ‘‘It ought to have been 
worth a hundred pounds,” said Mr. Smith; 
‘* but I’d be glad if anybody ’d offer me ten pounds 
for at.” 
As we strolled back across the fields—a small 
school-boy I had taken with me straying to the 
hedges after birds’-nests, for was it not May P— 
96 
