Amateur Farming: 351 



mutton or beef, but seen each species alive and dead, and heard 

 the history of its career. Bakewell had a prejudice against 

 showing his animals in the stall. According to long-established 

 custom, each sheep was brought into a specially designed show- 

 yard at one door and led out by another, the worst first, the 

 best last. There was much to see, such as graceful heifers and 

 their dams, sheep of wonderful symmetry, horses a picture of 

 strength and sturdiness, and hogs, in their exaggerated obesity, 

 the personification of ugliness. Guest after guest would linger 

 long about the noble white bull Twopenny, the great ram 

 Two-pounder, or the magnificent black cart stallion. 



When all the live stock had been paraded, the visitors were 

 shown the carcases of different kinds of sheep, in order that 

 they might judge for themselves which species was likely to 

 take the butcher's fancy. Here Bakewell would pause, to tell 

 his visitors that he was not breeding live-stock for the epicures, 

 who were fanciful about their mutton, and dissatisfied if its 

 gravy was not claret-coloured. The larders for which he 

 catered were those of the town operative ; and so, when he 

 showed any one a pickled neck of mutton, four and a half inches 

 thick with fat, he asked him to picture it, not dished up for 

 the evening repast of some noble lord, but the centre piece 

 of a Sunday dinner for a half-starved family in the potteries. 

 He would point out that there is a great difference between 

 the ox carrying thirty stone in roasting pieces and twenty 

 stone in boiling pieces, and another of the same weight, with 

 the preponderance of its flesh in the boiling parts. His prin- 

 ciple was, the " smaller the bones the truer the make of the 

 beast and the quicker its capacity of maturing." As an illus- 

 tration of his meaning, Bakewell would produce the huge bone 

 off a neck of mutton wdiich he had once picked clean in a 

 Norfolk inn,^ and ask his friends to compare it with those 

 that they had helped to polish at his own table. 



It is doubtful, however, if such evidences would have had 

 much weight on the mind of an expert. Young, for example, 

 when he visited Dishley in 1771, thought nothing of the speci- 



' Annals of Agriculture^ vol. vi. p. 476. 



