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256 A LIFE'S WORK IN IRELAND. 



could Le desired during the spring and summer 

 till harvest, hut it ^vas no sooner in shock than it 

 was enough to lift a sheaf to have a painful proof 

 of the crop's lightness. In fact, it was worse than 

 the crop of the small farmer in the next field, that 

 had not been a quarter so welldone by. There was 

 sunlight enough to ripen his thin, short-strawed 

 crop tolerably. But the ears of my handsome crop 

 were not half-filled, and much of the corn in them 

 was only fit for chickens' food. The same result 

 several years in succession at last taught its lesson. 

 I gave up trying to grow any corn except oats. 

 The common farmers, too, have gradually ceased to 

 grow wheat, except a small piece for their own 

 consumption (as it is one of the curiosities of our 

 stage of development that every farmer thinks it 

 needful to grow the food of himself and his family 

 on his own farm ; so, as potatoes will no longer 

 grow well, he grows some wheat wherever he can 

 for home consumption). They, too, have taken to 

 oats as the chief crop. "Wheat being usually lower 

 in price than it was in Corn-law times, and oats 

 much higher, no doubt tends to the same end. There 

 is a general opinion, too, that the local climate has 

 altered. The oats even are not the better sorts of 

 oats. Black Tartary oats, the coarsest sort known, 

 succeed best by far. But even with oats, and 

 thoroughly good farming, the produce in corn is not 

 on the average of years what it should be ; nothing 



