VIII. 



'TRUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A' MARL-PIT. 



AMONGST the legacies which the wisdom and labours 

 of antiquity had bequeathed to the Clay Farm and 

 its cultivators, one of the most curious and truly 

 puzzling was a quantity of Marl-pits. In every field 

 of five or six acres there was a great yawning ' Pit,' 

 deep enough to drown the weathercock on a church 

 steeple, and wide enough to accommodate the church 

 as well ; and when the broad hedgerows were stocked 

 away (and, in good truth, my two first winters made 

 strange havoc amongst those mounds of aggravating 

 width and crookedness), nothing can be imagined 

 more absurd than the effect of these deep wounds 

 disclosed upon the bosom of mother earth, lying thick 

 and threefold in the fields as now enlarged to an 

 average of about twenty acres each. What on 

 earth or rather under the earth was to be done 

 with them ? Favoured occupiers of the valleys and 



