THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 273 



done, a dressing of manure, the bailiff considering the bed 

 strong enough. I shall try the effect of sewage, and give 

 each plant a cup of strong drink when the spring comes 

 in, for our liquid-manure tank has long been brimful 



What a pleasant occupation it is getting the lambing- 

 yard ready ! We shall this year make it occupy the 

 half of a new stackyard we have established near the 

 bailiff's bedroom window. Having hollowed a long 

 strip about four yards wide to the depth of 18 inches, 

 and filled the trench with sifted dry wood and coal- 

 ashes, we shall build a roof of straw to it and a back of 

 wattled hurdles, along which, on the inside, deep rain- 

 spouts will be fixed, by way of mangers. We so 

 manage to make a great quantity of " artificial " to 

 drill in with the swedes. I have some dozen porkers 

 similarly bedded. The hen and duck houses are all 

 laid with sawdust, with which, too, the fattening 

 cattle are bedded. It does not give half the trouble 

 that straw does in the cleaning out, and goes much 

 further ; while we have ample use for the sheaves, 

 there being a good part of them cut-up with hay and 

 pulped swedes ; much, too, being strewn under the 

 terribly high-bred pets of the establishment. There is 

 a special virtue in the smell of the pine- wood sawdust : 

 it keeps off insect plagues, I think. Talking of pine- 

 wood reminds one of larch. At one corner of the farm 

 there rises at the base of a sloping arable field a conical 

 hillock, rounded on three sides, upon the fourth attach- 

 ing to and imbedded in the field. What it ever can 

 have been quite puzzles us. It might, from its shape, 

 have been a tumulus. The surrounding ground is high, 

 and a hundred feet above the level of a brook, which 

 runs at the bottom a meadow's width below. Rather a 



