COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 29 



producing ; and walked away. I turned once only, 

 and saw him leaning on his spade, and looking after 

 me. I can give you his soliloquy, for it was written 

 upon his attitude, like the lettering of a picture. 

 ' Well ! If that don't beat everything ! ' 

 A blessed thing, in its way, I say again, is the 

 untamed boldness of youth. There was not a full- 

 grown ' practical farmer ' within a ten-mile circuit of 

 the spot where the old drainer stood on that day 

 rapt in severe amazement, who would not have 

 thought it as much as his fair fame was worth to give 

 that order. Nothing but the inconceivable daring of 

 pure unmitigated THEORY would have ventured its 

 character upon such a throw. Now for the explana- 

 tion. 



Upon all wet thin cold clay soils, the wisdom of 

 antiquity has long established that you are only 

 to plough three or four inches deep ; that you are to 

 ridge up your lands into a certain round-backed 

 shape which the rain may run oif, as it would from 

 an umbrella, or the roof of a house ; that you are 

 never to cross-plough, or otherwise disturb this con- 

 secrated form into which the earth's surface has been 

 once-for-all moulded, but to keep scratching it, up 

 and down, shallow enough to insure a seed-time by 



