1857. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



383 



For the New Englavd Farmer. 



LETTER FEOM MR. FREKCH. 



London, England, June, 1857. 



My Friend Brown: — To do up the thing 

 properly in this matter of travelling in foreign 

 lands, there ought to be at least, two of us, a sort 

 of duplicate, one to see and one to record ; or rather 

 some photographic process by which one could 

 have, when he gets home at night, a picture copied, 

 from the retina of the impressions made there dur- 

 ing the day. "What were Hector or Achilles, or 

 Troy itself, had there been no Homer ; and what 

 does it avail for one man to see the world, if he 

 cannot make others see it too ? Wandering alone 

 here in England, relying mainly on a friendly vote 

 of the United States Agricultural Society for my 

 passport, and meeting kindness and hospitality 

 everywhere, I should be glad if our readers could 

 go with me daily and enjoy my views of Old Eng- 

 land. But to enable them to do this, the writing 

 man must labor as constantly as the seeing man, 

 for there is no hour here, whether in the streets, 

 in the Houses of Parliament, in the old churches, 

 the Tower of London, the Zoological Gardens, the 

 Parks, the Crystal Palace, the exhibitions of pic- 

 tures and other works of art, that does not furnish 

 matter of interest to every observing American. 



The differences in the first objects that meet 

 your view in the streets, interest you at once, but 

 are forgotten unless noted at the time. There goes 

 a carriage, a cross between an old-fashioned chaise 

 and a Boston cab, a two-wheeled machine, to carry 

 two persons, the driver perched up on a seat be- 

 hind, with the longest kind of a whip and reins, 

 driving like destruction in and out of all the bye- 

 ways, to avoid the crowded thoroughfares, and get 

 his passengers to their destination in the shortest 

 possible time. He is paid by the distance, and not 

 by the time he spends, and hastens on, or as he 

 calls it, drives across, and gains time though he 

 doubles the distance. The horse has no check- 

 rein or martingale, and cai-ries his nose accordingly, 

 that is to say, as far from his tail as possible. The 

 wheels are about as heavy as those of a horse-cart, 

 and the weight always seems to be behind the cen- 

 tre of gravity, so that one expects to see the horse 

 lifted from his feet at the next moment. This ve- 

 hicle is a Hansom, not for its beauty so called, but 

 because some Mr. Hansom has a patent on it, and 

 his name is in large letters on the side of each car- 

 riage. Then comes a pony carriage, with two gen- 

 teel-looking ladies driving a pony about one-half or 

 one-third the size of a common horse, through the 

 crowded streets, among drays and omnibuses — as 

 quietly threading their way as if no one else were 

 in the street, miraculously escaping destruction, 

 which seems always impending. Pony phaetons 

 with two ponies, ponies ridden by boys, ponies in 



carts, are constantly seen. Then again, the donkeys 

 are an institution of old England, little, patient, 

 abused creatures, not much taller than a French 

 merino sheep, carrying big panniers or cans of 

 milk balanced across their backs, often driven by 

 little brutes of boys who seem to delight in beating 

 them. I always jjity a donkey, wherever I see him, 

 — he is so little, and his ears are so very long, and 

 his tail is so like a cow's, that he is quite beneath 

 the dignity of a horse, without being anything 

 else in particular. Some one said he always des- 

 pised clams because they seemed such miserable 

 attempts to be oysters, and the donkeys always 

 strike me as perfect failures in an attempt to be 

 horses. But they are very useful, never die that I 

 can hear of — Dickens says nobody ever saw a dead 

 donkey — and they need nothing to eat that is fit to 

 eat. I am told the poor laborer who goes three or 

 four miles to his daily labor in the country here, 

 often rides a donkey to and from his work, and pro- 

 bably here the poor little animal, devoted to hard 

 work and hard fare, may find some sympathy. 



Horse railways have not yet found their way in- 

 to London. An American can hardly conceive of 

 the conservatism of England. The idea of such an 

 experiment as street railways strikes consternation 

 into the hearts of everybody. They would as soon 

 think of paying the national debt, or establishing 

 common schools, or abolishing the right of primo- 

 geniture, and allow all the children to inherit equal- 

 ly, or any other outrageous and unreasonable thing. 



I met a New-Yorker a day or two since, and 

 asked him why street railways had not been tried 

 here. "Wait," said he, "two hundred years, and 

 they will just begin to learn that such an improve- 

 ment is possible." 



But justice compels me to say, or rather, I am 

 happy to have it in my power to say, fur I feel very 

 amiable towards the mother country, that in many 

 respects, England is at this moment worthy of our 

 imitation, for her progress even. In some points 

 relative to the administration of justice in her 

 courts, she has made manifest advances, while we 

 in New England have stood quietly still, awe-strick- 

 en and uncovered in our veneration for old legal 

 fictions and forms, which are really entitled to no 

 more respect or reverence, than are the old horse- 

 hair gray wigs, which in this country every judge 

 and every barrister is compelled to wear in the 

 Courts. 



Of these matters, I may have something to say 

 at some proper time and place, when further obser- 

 vation shall have assisted my knowledge. In Ag- 

 riculture, too, we have much to learn of England. 

 I have been cautious to form no hasty conclusion^ 

 upon this subject, but I am convinced that capit;. i 

 and skill are employed here in the culture of the 

 soil, in a manner of which most of us have no ade- 

 quate conception. 



