52 TRAVELLING. 



for making half a dozen new ones ; but if such 

 matters are entered in a book, he easily finds what 

 he wants, and his knowledge will be in a much 

 clearer progression, by recurring to former ideas 

 and experience. Formerly farmers never read 

 books of husbandry : many do read them now ; 

 and there are few that will not furnish very valuable 

 hints. These should be noted, that when an oc- 

 casion offers, use may be made of them. Such an 

 employment of a winter evening, is a very different 

 one from spending it at a public-house, in the same 

 company over and over again, which, after a time, 

 becomes a pump that yields no water. 



TRAVELLING. 



The reader may also be surprized to see such 

 an article as this in a Calendar of the business of 

 farming ; but were I to name one circumstance 

 which has, in the last twenty years, advanced 

 the husbandry of this country more than any 

 other, I should fix on the practice of farmers 

 taking thrir nags (to use an expression of Bake- 

 well), to sec -what other people arc doing. Men 

 who are confined their whole lives to one spot or 

 vicinity, necessarily contract a too limited ran ire 

 of thought. Their ideas flow so much in the 

 same channel, and dwell so much on the same ob- 

 jects, that new ones, however useful, make too 

 faint an impression : nor can they know what is 

 doing by the best farmers, on soils perhaps exactly 

 similar to their own. To take a ride, for a fort- 

 night, through four or five hundred miles of 



country, 



