'FARM TO LET.' 101 



if you looked into the corners you might have fancied 

 yourself in a garden-tool-house, if you looked on the 

 mantel-piece you thought of a chemist's shop : four 

 dried lumps of soil, as hard as stones, lay at one end 

 of it on separate pieces of ex- white paper, and through 

 their coating of dust feebly indicated the three pri- 

 mary colours, blue red and yellow, with a sort of grey 

 for the fourth. Over several tiers of news-papers 

 between the windows, at the further end of the room 

 lay at full length two ' new and improved ' Drainage- 

 levels, out of Spirit though, for each was care- 

 fully tied up with a direction card to the maker: 

 'rejected addresses' evidently. Odd combinations, 

 unmeaning and half meaning, disported themselves 

 over the confusion of the little den : the end of a 

 large pruning-knife peered out between the sheets of 

 a new half-cut volume marked ' Dendrology,' sug- 

 gesting something about Theory and Practice, and 

 clearly exhibiting, by the jagged leaves, the moral as 

 well as physical truth that sharp knives are bad paper 

 cutters. An old quarto volume of Raleigh's History 

 of the World, in black letter, lay open on a little 

 table near the fireplace, with a bundle of Cigars and 

 some papers of Potato-seed on one page; and a 

 small sharp Axe on the other. A whetstone lay 



