' FALLOWS ' AND WHAT FOLLOWS. 63 



least " in agriculture and in everything else perhaps, 

 with the old exceptions of Law and Matrimony. 



The first field which I had drained, and to whose 

 chronicled history I must now return, was a tolerably 

 rectangular result of what had formerly been two fields, 

 and part of a third ; and consisted, after its enlarge- 

 ment, of about twenty-two acres. One half of this, 

 that is to say, one of the fields as previously fenced, I 

 devoted to a crop of Swedes the first that ever had 

 been heard of on the farm (and the last, in the opinion 

 of all surrounding Wisdom, that ever would be) ; the 

 other part, for reasons in which I suspect you would 

 have acquiesced, had you seen it, I determined to in- 

 dulge with its old but long-forgotten friend, a bare 

 summer fallow, and with a dose of that same LIME, 

 about whose chemical effects and influences we had so 

 long a soliloquy some time back. Until the end of 

 April all went on alike over the whole of the twenty- 

 two acres. Ploughing, scuffling, and levelling were the 

 order of the day, to the great scandal of the high 

 ridges and their admirers ; but on the ponderous and 

 august entry of the clod-crusher (a new monster in 

 those days) , the first-mentioned half of the field took 

 leave of the other, and as each clod yielded up its in- 

 dividuality under the potent arguments of that most 

 persuasive of implements, the modern fallow went a- 



