10 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



Because there's no Fall! replied collective Wisdom. 



Has it ever been tried with a Spirit-level ? 



Now this was not a fair question. Spirit-levels (if 

 they had any meaning or existence at all) were unin- 

 telligible mathematical-looking instruments of purely 

 professional nature, only seen (if ever) in the hands of 

 road-surveyors' assistants and people of that sort. 

 They had nothing whatever to do with farming. The 

 question was unfair : it contained an ambiguous term. 



Picture to yourself, however, the following conclu- 

 sion from it. A bleak foggy November day : a long 

 rambling space, marsh or meadow, as you might 

 choose to call it, of some twenty acres in extent, and 

 about the third part of a mile in length, with a nar- 

 row thick plantation of rushes, sedges, and brooklime, 

 and such aquatic vegetation, threading its way in one 

 long dank line from end to end, by such fantastic 

 meanderings, that it looked as if the hidden channel 

 of choked moisture it concealed had been making a 

 continued series of experiments from time out of 

 mind in search of an outlet; and after centuries of 

 struggle and disappointment, had at length arrived 

 quite by accident at a certain point, at one end of the 

 meadow, where you might see a pair of high mud- 

 boots standing, or rather soaking, with a man in them, 



