THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 75 



least until Mr. F. Buckland can persuade the nation to 

 partake of horse-steak ; in which case I expect there 

 would be more horses bred, and so a better field for 

 selection ; when the screws could be made into soup, to 

 which no suspicion could attach, as does to the dark 

 details of the Mugby Junction mixture. At present it 

 is too much of a lottery. You don't know what you 

 may get; and when you do get a nice one, it either 

 dies of unjustifiable inflammation, or, as did a good 

 four-year-old of mine lately, jumps too pluckily at a 

 monster fence, slips on the frozen bank, conies down 

 with his eye upon a hedge-stake, and is brought home 

 literally at half-price. Heigh-ho for horseflesh ! Writing 

 of Mr. Buckland, I wonder he does not give us, in his 

 amusing paper Land arid Water, a description of his 

 swallowing a young frog, to which experiment he was 

 induced by seeing some rustic Arabs do it by the village 

 pool. The moments preceding execution I remember 

 his describing as being so fearfully Pong. " I thought 

 he'd (from his position on the Professor's lingual orna- 

 ment) never jump," was his description of his uncoveted 

 experience. 



This fine weather has enabled us to get the oats 

 sown in good season, as the expression is. We only 

 hope that the price of this cereal may continue at its 

 present elevated pitch. Our difficult, rough, side-lands 

 may then give us a fair return for what their tedious 

 cultivation costs. 



There is a noisy conclave among the rooks this morn- 

 ing. The resolutions before the house must be inte- 

 resting. They have been wheeling in the air for some 

 time, filing off in the far distance until quite undis- 

 cernible by the naked eye ; then coming back in shoals 



