THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FAEM. 183 



there are the finest in the whole field, and would be 

 respectable any season. Possibly the oily juice of the 

 marl may suit their taste, or the knobs may have 

 afforded them such a wholesome shade from wet and 

 sun, as Jonah found in his gourd. A lumpy fallow is 

 propitious to young wheat we know — possibly in con- 

 sideration of the shelter it lends, or of the fresh suck 

 it allows the spreading rootlets with every shower. I 

 have at last found out now that industrious dear little 

 Dutch clover manages to make itself an establishment 

 in my pasture, that is abused either by excessive drain- 

 ing or extraordinary sun heat, as this summer, or by 

 the rigid cutting of the lawn-mower ; and which once 

 attained it manages to maintain through the wide 

 spread of its fibrous roots. I learnt this lesson on our 

 slopes this year. They were absolutely burnt up like 

 King Alfred's cakes, or a fox's tail (?) shall I say, so 

 burnt that we all, fat Melon included, gave them up as 

 lost to life. Even these darling little plants found it 

 impossible to spring in extended growth. They were 

 content, or obliged to sit, each one stem over his root- 

 bed, just as you see the Alpine Marmot do before the 

 mouth of his burrow, in the nursery books on natural 

 history ; but, then, whether or not from want of exer- 

 cise in having their range so restricted, and a conse- 

 quent concentration of juices, they indulged all in a 

 most dowager-like tiara of seed pods, the contents of 

 which in due season fell so thickly as to defy the birds — 

 who, I dare say, got tired of their monotonous diet, 

 preferring the flesh pots of an adjoining wild cherry — 

 especially in one spot, along the line of a house drain, 

 where the sward was simply reduced to a sepia tinge, 

 they lay as thick as comfits on a confectioner's window, 



