'LANDLORD AND TENANT.' 121 



duty-laden. To take the one without the other is, in 

 the long run, impossible. And curiously enough, the 

 Earth is herself the first witness of a breach of the 

 duties she devolves on and between those who culti- 

 vate, or inherit, her gifts, as she was of the earliest 

 wrong committed between man and his brother man. 

 She speaks, with most miraculous organ; and tells 

 you the character of the cultivator, or the proprietor, 

 or both, as plainly as your eyes may choose to read it. 

 Take a walk through an Allotment-ground. To an 

 expert eye, does not each little oblong plot of land, 

 with its varied produce, care, culture, and condition, 

 tell its separate tale, as if the soil were the destined 

 mirror of the hand and mind of man ? Does it need 

 the voice or finger of the showman to point out the 

 characteristics of the several occupants ? Here there 

 is industry, there idleness ; here again there is hard 

 lalx)ur, without skill or knowledge; there you have 

 experimental attempts, despising established practice 

 over much, and ending in failure : here again is toil 

 over-tasked and struggling against want of means 

 the spade without the dung-fork a hard and pitiless 

 struggle; there plenty of manure-heaps, but waste- 

 fully and unevenly applied : here again is loss of time 

 upon too close a minuteness and pettiness of culture, 



