A LATE HARVEST 415 



proprietor who spoils his tenants by over-easy rents 

 and the rack-renter who is always having new tenants. 

 It is difficult to make a success of the British system 

 of tenant-farming unless the landowner can afford to 

 take a long view and follow a continuous policy. The 

 farm was worked on what is now the usual English 

 variant of the Norfolk rotation, a five-course shift of 

 roots, barley, seeds, wheat, and oats or other spring 

 corn ; three saleable crops in the five years are justified 

 in modern farming by the great fertility that has been 

 imported in artificial manures and feeding stuffs. On 

 most of the fields the texture of the soil changed down 

 the slope from a light sandy loam to something much 

 stiffer, approaching a clay, so the swedes were always 

 sown on the lighter half with such potatoes as were 

 grown, while mangels and cabbages occupied the 

 heavier land. Our host was a great advocate of 

 cabbages, using them both for his milch cows and his 

 sheep ; but, contrary to the usual opinion, he believed he 

 got better results when they were drilled in situ than 

 when transplanted. He was certainly a master of 

 the technique of root-growing, usually the best test of 

 skill in husbandry, and though 1912 has been a com- 

 paratively easy year in which to get a stand of roots, 

 his swedes were a picture for size and regularity. 



Though October had come, the last of the harves 

 was just being carted in some spring wheat in which 

 the clover had grown so rankly that it had been 

 extremely difficult to get the sheaves into a fit state to 

 carry. Some of the land being on the early side, the 

 corn had suffered severely from the weather ; a whole 

 field of oats, for instance, was not to be threshed, but 

 was being cut up for food, corn and straw together. 

 Our host, however, spent a great deal of trouble over his 

 corn, sorting it when it was carted, and grading the 



