322 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



Denmark is sufficient to show that in a Free-Trade 

 country all was not lost when the people got cheap 

 corn from America. There is a tradition in the 

 writer's family that an ancestor bought land at 50 

 an acre, and reaped its cost in the first year's wheat 

 harvest. Oh those golden days of agriculture ! 

 Yet only two years ago, it is said, some one here 

 bought land at 15, and reaped its cost in the first 

 year's harvest of sainfoin seed. Certain it is that 

 if you buy land and leave it under grass you will 

 have to wait many years before you pay for it out 

 of crops. And many a farmer finds it difficult to 

 pay a rent, even much reduced from the Crimean 

 level, out of grass. The Crimean rent was not so 

 much a fifty-shillings-a-quarter rent as an intensive- 

 culture rent. As it happens, the country of these 

 frequent large farm-houses is a country of arable 

 farms. The lightness and thinness of its soil make 

 it easy of cultivation, and obviate the costly ex- 

 pedient of frequent summer fallows. The same 

 quality prevents its successful laying down to per- 

 manent pasture, and thus extends into every field 

 the beneficent sway of clover and mangolds. At 

 the same time, not yet will men build again such 

 generous houses out of the profits of farming. Just 

 as the little weavers, once tributary to the farmer, 

 have been supplanted by the great wool mills, so 

 the opposite process of disintegration tends to bring 

 down the farmer from his proud position. In place 

 of the great man, secure within his keep, and drawing 

 by means of abundant capital abundant income from 

 wide fields, we have had the tenant skimming a 

 livelihood from wide and rather neglected grass lands. 



