8 GENERAL PREFACE 



ness, which, first or last, I have not performed 

 with my own hands. And, as to it^ I owe very 

 little to hooks^ except to that of Tull; for I never 

 read a good one in my life, except a French book, 

 called the Manuel du Jardinier. 



8. As to farming, I was bred at the plough-tail, 

 and in the Hop-Gardens of Farnhamin Surrey, my 

 native place, and which spot, as it so happened, 

 is the neatest in England, and, 1 beheve, in the 

 whole world. All there is a garden. The neat 

 culture of the hop extends its influence to the 

 fields round about. Hedges cut with sheers and 

 every other mark of skill and care strike the eye 

 at Farnham, and become fainter and fainter as you 

 go from it in every direction. I have had, be- 

 sides, great experience in farming for several years 

 of late; for, one man will gain more knowledge in 

 a year than another will in a life. It is the taste 

 for the thing that really gives the knowledge. 



9. To this taste, produced in me by a desire 

 to imitate a father, whom 1 ardently loved, and to 

 whose every word I listened with admiration, I 

 owe no small part of my happiness, for a greater 

 portion of which very few men ever had to be 

 grateful to God. These pursuits, innocent in 

 themselves, instructive in their very nature, and 

 always tending to preserve health, have been a 

 constant, a never-failing source, of recreation with 

 me ; and, which I count amongst the greatest of 

 their benefits and blessings, they have always, in 

 my house, supplied the place of the card-table, 

 the dice-box, the chess-board and the lounging 

 bottle. Time never hangs on the hands of him, 

 who delights in these pursuits, and who has books 

 on the subject to read. Even when shut up with- 

 in the walls of a prison for having complained that 

 Enghshmen had been flogged in the heart of Eng- 

 land under a guard of German Bayonets and Sf?- 

 bres ; even then, I found in these pursuits a 



