MANURES. 71 



and we blame everybody else very much indeed ; 

 and we do hope the time will soon be here when 

 such a sinful waste will no longer disgrace an 

 enlightened age ; but beyond the contribution of 

 this occasional homily, it is, of course, no affair 

 of ours. Each man assures his neighbor that the 

 process of desiccation is quite easy, and the art 

 of deodorizing almost nice ; but nobody ' goes 

 in. ' The reader, I have no doubt, has with me 

 had large experience of this perversity in neigh- 

 bors, and ofttimes has been perplexed and pained 

 by their dogged strange reluctance to follow the 

 very best advice. There was at Cambridge, 

 some thirty years ago, an insolent, foul-mouthed, 

 pugnacious sweep, who escaped for two terms 

 the sublime licking which he ' annexed ' finally, 

 because no one liked to tackle the soot. There 

 were scores of undergraduates to whom pugihsm 

 was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, who 

 had the power and the desire to punish his im- 

 pudence, but they thought of the close wrestle 

 — they reflected on the ' hug,' and left him. To 

 drop metaphor, there is no more valuable manure; 

 but it is, from circumstances which require no 

 explanation, more suitable for the farm than the 



