212 Saddle and Sirloin. 



passed by two years the days of Sir Tatton, and is 

 as brisk as ever at a Leicester, pig, or shorthorn 

 bargain, lives at Brandsby about five miles to the 

 right ; and a ride of a few miles farther brings us to 

 Helmsley Station. The scenery of the country is a 

 striking combination of wildness and fertility. Few 

 foxes would care to be at home in Grange Whin or 

 Waterloo Plantation or among the laurels of the Ter- 



five seasons in succession. He was the top price, and Mr. Stone always 

 said that he should not have left Quorndon if he could have gone on 

 with his flock. Since then Mr. Wiley has relied on his own flock for 

 tups, with occasional dips by sale or hire into the Burgess and the 

 Buckley blood from head-quarters, as long as the Cotgrave Place and 

 Normanton flocks were kept up. With such antecedents, he may well 

 pride himself on a flock of really " Pure Bakewells." He lets on an 

 average about sixty tups a year by private bargain, and he has always 

 shown sheep with great success at the Highland and Agricultural 

 Society and the Yorkshire Society, and taken prizes, more especially 

 with his gimmers, which also won him a second at the Royal Agricul- 

 tural Society at Chester. He was first with them at the Newcastle 

 Royal in 1864, and beat Colonel Inge, after a sharp contest, with quite 

 a model pen. At the Manchester Royal in 1869 he was second to Mr. 

 Borton. 



His long, low-pitched house, with the dark green Cotoniastus creep- 

 ing over it, and peeping with its red flowerets in at every lattice, is quite 

 the realization of a snug Yorkshire home. Young Painter (a son of the 

 sheep in Mr. Wiley's picture), Young Fajback, Landseer, and others, 

 were nibbling close up to the garden wicket ; and. one of Chester Sym- 

 metry's daughters was roving along the hedge-side, and seasoning her 

 bacon by anticipation with a dainty meal beneath the "cock-pits," 

 which have been specially chosen from among apple trees, on account 

 of their peculiarly thin and open wood, to engraft upon crab-stocks in 

 the neat hedge-rows of the farm. 



Mr. Wiley's holding consists of 500 acres, and seems to take in three 

 sides of a square. The ewes are kept principally on seeds, at his 

 Warren House Farm, which is higher and lighter land, near the Wigan- 

 thorpe moors, while the tups are brought down during the summer to 

 the Brandsby pastures. Sixty acres of the latter is glebe, and the re- 

 mainder, a great portion of which is park, belongs to the Cholmeley 

 family at the Hall. 



Long and steady success as a breeder of Shorthorns, Leicesters, and 

 pigs has not one whit weakened the belief in Mr. Wiley's mind that the 

 plough is the first great creditor of a nation, and he has followed rigidly in 

 the track of his father, who began with thorns and stones upon the 

 Mosswood Farm in Craike parish, in 1763 (twenty- four years prior to 

 his taking the Brandsby farms in addition), and then became one of the 



