88 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



tory and value ay ! he may be bold enough to say 

 who has known and felt it, what a blessed thought 

 is a well-drained Field ! A portion, a small yet mea- 

 surable portion of Nature's reality, brought by the 

 hand of man from sterility to fruitfulness from its 

 first and incomplete existence to its intended and de- 

 veloped state. What a thought to cheer and lighten 

 the dull November fog, that hundreds and thousands 

 of acres in this moist England of ours which once 

 began their annual saturation with the Autumn rains, 

 and lay in barren quagmire the livelong Winter 

 through, unwakenable from the clammy trance of 

 their yearly death even by the cheerful voice and 

 breath of coming Spring, are now gently transmit- 

 ting through their porous texture, the healthful rain 

 that feeds what it once poisoned ; and that as every 

 shower ceases, then comes a rich after-gift of atmo- 

 spheric air following in a thousand sinuosities the 

 threadlike channels down which the rain, like a pio- 

 neer, has found and led the way through the soil, to 

 the very drain, three or four feet below the surface. 

 What a thought is this, to those who know it, and 

 have earned its pleasure ! 



Nature abhors a vacuum. True, most true, O phi- 

 losophic chemist ! Where the drop has once disap- 



