CA.YADA. 95 



"favours at once, especially as I have not had the hap- 



" piness of being able to confer any." 



In addition to what is said above, it may be explained 

 that the hundred and ten acres which formed the farm 

 were divided by the high-road into two portions. The one 

 consisting of fifty acres, but having a frame dwelling-house 

 and barn, fell to Mr. Jaques ; the western section, of sixty 

 acres, having a log-hut, an apple-orchard, a young maple- 

 sugary, and four tons of hay, Philip Gosse took for his. 

 This statement, however, gives much too favourable a 

 notion of the enterprise. Only about a third of the acreage 

 was cleared and in cultivation, and the whole farm, 

 although originally of good land, was sadly neglected and 

 exhausted by the miserable husbandry of its former pos- 

 sessors. The new tenant bought a horse and a cow, 

 stabling them in the log-hut. His first labour was to get 

 in his hay, and then he undertook to plough about five 

 acres, himself both holding and driving. He got three 

 acres more cleared of bushes and underwood, and ploughed, 

 by hired labour. These eight acres were all his tillage 

 land at first, and he divided them, as he had proposed, 

 between wheat, barley, peas, and potatoes. In all the 

 farm work he was quite unaided by the Jaqueses, the 

 notion of all toiling together, in an atmosphere of refined 

 intelligence, for a common purse, having broken down at 

 the first moment. The two laborious little farms had to 

 be w^orked independently, and Philip Gosse paid a modest 

 sum as a boarded lodger. In August they got into their 

 house, and one of Gosse's earliest acts was to paint the 

 outside of it with a mixture of skim milk and powdered lime. 



The Jaqueses, in particular, were soon disillusioned. Mrs. 

 Jaques, who had been brought up as a lady, and who was 

 then nursing a baby, found it almost intolerably irksome 

 to carry out the entire labour of the house herself, but they 



