VI11. 

 ' TKUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A 'MARL-PIT. 



AMONGST the legacies which the wisdom and labours 

 of antiquity had bequeathed to the Clay Farm and 

 its cultivators, one of the most curious and truly 

 puzzling was a quantity of Marl-pits. In every field of 

 five or six acres there was a great yawning ' Pit/ deep 

 enough to drown the weathercock on a church steeple, 

 and wide enough to accommodate the church as well : 

 and when the broad hedgerows were stocked away, 

 (and, in good truth, my two first winters made strange 

 havoc amongst those mounds of aggravating width 

 and crookedness), nothing can be imagined more ab- 

 surd than the effect of these deep wounds disclosed 

 upon the bosom of mother earth, lying thick and 

 threefold in the fields, as now enlarged to an average 

 of about twenty acres each. What on earth or 



