196 THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE chap. 



the water, or a pink speckled trout glides 

 out of sight. 



In many of our midland and northern 

 counties most of the meadows lie in parallel 

 undulations or "rigs." These are generally 

 about a furlong (220 yards) in length, and 

 either one or two poles (5i or 11 yards) in 

 breadth. They seldom run straight, but tend 

 to curve towards the left. At each end of 

 the field a high bank, locally called a balk, 

 often 3 or 4 feet high, runs at right angles to 

 the rigs. In small fields there are generally 

 eight, but sometimes ten, of these rigs, which 

 make in the one case 4, in the other 5 acres. 

 These curious characters carry us back to the 

 old tenures, and archaic cultivation of land, 

 and to a period when the fields were not in 

 pasture, but were arable. 



They also explain our curious system of 

 land measurement. The " acre " is the amount 

 which a team of oxen were supposed to plough 

 in a day. It corresponds to the German 

 "morgen" and the French '' journ^e." The 

 furlong or long "furrow" is the distance 

 which a team of oxen can plough conven- 



