THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 23 



sore. One fears that they are not there for any real 

 good to ourselves, but that it is only their lines of 

 Torres Vedras for them to fall back upon when the 

 flood rises and sweeps across the meadows, where they 

 are luxuriating at present, it is to be hoped, on wire- 

 worm. And a pace they can go, too, when terrified, 

 as you may find with a terrier any day. The way the 

 Fi-ench tested their speed was ingenious. Poor animal ! 

 deprived of sight, he is keenly alive to sound. Well, 

 they marked the working of one across a flat, and in 

 each mound of earth thrown up they stuck down a 

 reed with a flag attached. Having done so with some 

 half-dozen, men were put with watches along the run ; 

 w^hile another, stealing on tip-toe to where the sod 

 could be seen moving from the excavation that was 

 proceeding, blew a horrible hulla-baloo, such as an 

 aggravated French musician alone could devise, beside 

 his burrow. Back in terror sped the mole, unsuspect- 

 ing, down the run, in his consternation inadvertently 

 precipitating the reeds ; so the time between the fall of 

 each was taken, and the fugitive's pace ascertained to 

 a second. 



I lost two lambs last night. They were lost in 

 some degree from unintentional neglect, I think. The 

 shepherd did not, being elsewhere occupied, attend to 

 the strong purging they exhibited as soon as should 

 have been. Some more showed the same symptoms 

 to-day. I was afraid that I was to suffer from this 

 new disease, of which Mr. Reynolds discourses so ably 

 in the last number of the Royal Agricultural Society's 

 Journal; and I ordered them the treatment he pre- 

 scribes — viz., to be moved on to an old pasture, and to 

 be furnished with plenty of sweet hay and bran and 



