180 THE HUNTING FIELD 



not a money-bag loading business, like many sedentary 

 trades and pursuits, but then it is a certain means of 

 good and comfortable living, and requires no long 

 slavish apprenticeship, or extraordinary power of 

 intellect to learn, and no great capital to set up with. 

 Suppose a parent can give his son two or three 

 thousand pounds, to set him up in a farm of from 

 eight hundred to a thousand a-year rent. For that 

 he gets a good house and garden, and his farm will 

 furnish him with every real requirement — not to say 

 luxury of life, and instead of imbibing the foul, noisome 

 air of the town, in some confined chamber or manu- 

 facturing office, and getting snatches of life by 

 occasional dives into the country, his whole year is 

 one of wholesome, pleasurable excitement and enjoy- 

 ment. To a lover of the country no life can compare 

 with that of a Farmer. He enjoys from youth to age 

 what others slave and toil in hopes of reaching at the 

 end. Farming is the nearest approach to primitive 

 independence of any calling we can adopt. The 

 Farmer is his own master, and though he may not 

 derive so large an apparent income as the investor of 

 money in, or follower of other pursuits, yet when we 

 come to see what the Farmer gets for nothing, that 

 others have to pay for, and observe how one thing 

 dovetails in with another, it will be found that after all, 

 the enjoyments of life are not regulated by the figures 

 in three ruled columns of red ink, but in making the 

 most of such advantages as circumstances afford and 

 put in our way. Take a horse for instance — a Farmer 

 will keep a horse well for five-and-twenty pounds a- 

 year, whereas the Londoner will have to pay his 

 guinea a-week for the keep of his, and then very likely 

 only have it half "done by." There is cent, per cent, 

 at once, and there is much the same difference in the 

 price of articles of domestic consumption. To talk of 

 dining with a Farmer is enough to set a Cockney's 

 mouth watering for a week — the very mention of the 



