VROVOC4TIONS OF A BAD FENCE. 27 



suffering the cows to poke your windows, defile 

 your doors, and rub their necks, leaving the brown 

 hair, on the greased corners of your harled house. 

 This has at least the merit of a system, in which 

 no part counteracts the whole; and the taste that 

 approves of grazing, with its understood accom- 

 paniments, up to the doorstep, has not long gone 

 by. But to fence, and yet not fence, is faulty 

 not in point of taste, but of reason; and to exclude 

 your own cows from your garden, whilst you ad- 

 mit hares and rabbits which are not your own, can 

 scarcely be reckoned charity, and is not very justi- 

 fiable on the ground of prudence. But a garden 

 in all probability you will have; and if a fence 

 secure against all intruders be difficult, let the diffi- 

 culty be met by a greater namely, the annoyance, 

 in various ways, repeated daily, and continued all 

 the years of your life. 



You have sown your small culinary and flower 

 seeds in fine season, and raked all in, neat and 

 clean; and when you look out to see whether the 

 young sprouts yet carry the dewdrop, you find a 

 lot of hens, like partridges under a dry hedge, 

 revelling in the luxury of filling their feathers with 

 the soiL, and repaying what they take away with the 

 plumage which they leave. You have a standard 

 pear, whose quality you have secured by grafting 

 and whose fruit you are waiting for year after year; 

 and that is the very tree around which all the cats 

 of the village choose to assemble for the peculiar 

 diversion of exercising their claws, piercing the core, 



