viii PREFACE 



scriptive of our wanderings which, during the following 

 autumns and winters of 1910-12, appeared in the 

 Times. To the proprietors of the Times I am indebted 

 for permission to republish. Little has been altered 

 from the original text ; a certain amount of pruning 

 and correction, some rearrangement of moods and 

 tenses, and an occasional interpolation have been 

 made ; otherwise I found, after various trials, that I 

 should have been compelled to rewrite the whole as a 

 more or less formal account of British farming, to the 

 certain loss of whatever freshness of impression I had 

 gained by setting down straightway what I had seen 

 and the opinions thereby aroused. Had I been per- 

 suaded that by greater trouble I could have con- 

 verted the articles into a more readable book, that 

 effort would have been freely made ; for to publish 

 an account of an agricultural tour is to invite an 

 invidious comparison with those two masters of their 

 double craft of farming and writing -Arthur Young 

 and William Cobbett. 



My recommendation must be the intrinsic interest 

 of the subject and the fact that these journeys were 

 taken at an instructive time in the development of our 

 agriculture, when the land and its management had 

 somewhat suddenly become a matter of interest to our 

 general population. One outcome of that renewed 

 attention to agriculture on the part of the State had 

 been the Small Holdings Act ; other legislative actions 

 were being promised or discussed, the break-up of the 

 great estates seemed to have begun, though it now 

 would appear that the sales of 1910-11 were due 



