APPENDIX. 577 



To the Same. 



WALTON HALL, April 9, 1858. 



My dear Friend, I received your very welcome and instructive 

 letter of March 14, on the 3ist of the same month. It really gives 

 most sound and ample information to those who feel inclined to 

 speculate in transatlantic securities. Should any of my rash friends 

 consult me on the subject, I shall produce your letter; and, in offer- 

 ing its contents to their notice, I shall pronounce emphatically that 

 most valuable of all words " Beware !" 



As regards myself, I have ever had a most salutary horror of specu- 

 lation under any shape. I have never dabbled in the Funds, and I 

 have resisted manfully every attempt to seduce me into railway shares 

 and railway directorships. In banks I have suffered for my credulity. 

 Out of three, in which I placed unbounded confidence, two have 

 failed. And only the other day, all my malt has been confiscated 

 most unjustly by our Government, because the owner of the malt- 

 kiln died suddenly, just as I was about to send my cart to fetch it 

 home. We live in a strange world, and in still stranger times. 

 Nothing can exceed in atrocity the daily murders and forgeries which 

 are perpetrated here in England a country the " admiration of sur- 

 rounding nations." 



I have something curious in ornithology for you. In the year 1814 

 I altered the bye-wash of the water from the lake, and caused it to 

 carry off the water from the surface instead of from the bottom. 

 This seems to have destroyed the weeds which gave food to the coots. 

 Up to the period of the change, we swarmed with coots ; after the 

 change, these birds all disappeared. For more than forty years I 

 have only seen two coots on the water, and they did not tarry. Now 

 that we have caused the drainage to run from the bottom, we per- 

 ceive the former weeds rising again, and the coots have become very 

 plentiful. 



Till within these two months, our white or barn-owls once so 

 common here seem to have abandoned the Park. For fifteen 

 years I never saw or heard one ; but, occasionally, I found skeletons 



2 O 



