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some intermission of the rain. An enterprising farmer will 

 seize every favourable moment to forward the operations in 

 which he is interested, and not sit, with his hands across, wait- 

 ing for a long tract of serene weather, which may not come, 

 till his all be lost. In the rainy climate of our insular situa- 

 tion, surrounded with high mountains, the business of the 

 husbandman must often, in any season, particularly in harvest, 

 be done in snatches, or not done at all. There are favourable 

 moments in all the business of life, especially in farming, which 

 if once past, a similar opportunity may never recur. I knew 

 a farmer, in such a season as is here alluded to, who saved his 

 crop, while his neighbours lost theirs, by employing his people 

 to work all night, and allowing them to lie by all day, because 

 the nights were fair and clear, with some wind and frost, and 

 the days rainy. 



In watering lint it is not uncommon to give it too little time 

 in the canal, and too much on the field. It were a more sen- 

 sible and safer procedure for securing the crop, and better also 

 for the quality of the lint, to let it lie in the water until it be 

 fully ready, and either not to spread it all, or to give it only 

 a short time on the grass. It might be set upon end, like the 

 geats of corn, and exposed to the wind as soon as the water 

 had dropped from it, for a short space, on the brink of the 

 canal ; and if there was any doubt of its being fully watered, 

 a little more time might be given it in this situation. This 

 is the practice abroad in the lint-countries, and in some places 

 at home. The lint is thus watered equally, which is hardly 

 possible on a field, where the under part, which is always 

 buried in grass and corroded with dew, if it remains long in 

 that situation, must be rotten before the upper part be suffi- 

 ciently done ; and perhaps the whole may be lost in a rainy 

 season before it can be got up. By that management the 

 silky gloss and green colour of the flax is equally and more 

 eflfectually preserved. It is a mere deception to suppose that 

 bleaching lint on the field will facilitate the bleaching of the 

 cloth. No cloth is so easily or so uniformly bleached as that 

 made of lint, which is fully and equally watered in the canal. 



