248 OCTOBER 



disobeyed his injunction, he said, &quot; I ll advance you the 

 sixpence, and that makes your bid a shilling &quot; ; and so 

 put an end to the half-measures. 



A deal of farming history was written for those who 

 cared to read in the proceedings. For example, two lines 

 of antique rubbish were ranged across an arable field. 

 Half of it had just been subjected to a &quot; cultivator &quot; ; 

 and you could detect the reason, which was not, perhaps, 

 wholly altruistic, and for the sake of the next tenant, if 

 any. The sides and tops and roots of thistles and docks 

 protruded freely. The cultivation was an act of conceal 

 ment, not of preparation for new crops. Time was when 

 a departing farmer could claim very considerable sums 

 for the unexhausted wealth he had left in the ground. 

 To-day damages or dilapidations for weedy and pauper 

 ised fields are a less unlikely sequel. It was said of the 

 last crop that one farmer in another part of England 

 reaped in his last harvest that the straw was so short that 

 the knives of the reaper cut through the ears of barley. 

 What exactly had grown beside thistles on the scene 

 of the sale was difficult to conjecture, but one might, per 

 haps, safely infer the shortness of its straw, if the crop 

 was grain. 



Nevertheless, the holding was an arable not a grass 

 holding, and that at any rate is on the credit side ; and 

 the first people into the field might have seen a large 

 covey of partridges rise and fly over the wood. They 

 are birds of the ploughland. It is almost a general rule, 

 the better the farmery, the more the partridges ; and 

 this holding, which may never be cultivated again, had 

 attracted a good many birds. We may perhaps take it 

 as an omen that the partridges have flourished almost 

 beyond the best in the records (at least, in some districts) 

 in the year when the arable area has begun to increase. 



