190 THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 



We are glad to welcome Mr. Thornton's Shorthorn 

 Circular, but to make it really valuable, besides keeping 

 advertisement sheets, he ought to give us slices of the 

 lore respecting the earlier days of this grand bovine 

 race which he is said to possess ; reliable anecdotes of 

 the bulls and cows, whose names the Herd Book holds, 

 and particulars of Shorthorn sales long gone hy. The 

 padding of recent matter, such as we all have for our- 

 selves or in the Journal (e.g. the prize list of the Royal 

 Society's last meeting), I regard as dead weight ; any- 

 how, I wish the publication well. 



I see the river is rising. The floods descend from 

 the wild Welsh mountains so rapidly on occasion that 

 we can scarcely be too quick in moving our stock. 



I dare say some of you will have read Mr. Lord's de- 

 scription of his tour as a naturalist in North America : 

 a most interesting work I may observe. He mentions 

 a tribe of Indians whose teeth are quite worn away 

 from chewing salmon that have been split and dried in 

 the sun, owing to a coating they get of fine gritty 

 sand blown upon them during the curing. This sort 

 of evil, and even more, we, who dwell along the banks 

 of this lovely but insidious river, suffer from. There is 

 a deposit of fine sand left upon the herbage, which not 

 only grates upon the teeth but accumulates in the 

 intestines and kills the animal. After a flood the more 

 prudent wait for the occuiTence of a heavy shower to 

 wash off the powder. 



Those lovely young pheasants, which I mentioned 

 before, have become so dreadfully tame, that I am 

 afraid they may come to grief Not only do they fly 

 up to be fed at the different windows, but they have 

 taken to wandering upon the high road. I don't think, 



