WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 123 
pennyweight of it, hundreds of tons, all shipped over 
the sea to India, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, and, 
above all, America, to buy wheat. It was said that 
Pompey and his sons covered the great earth with their 
bones, for each one died in a different quarter of the 
world ; but now he would want two more sons for Aus- 
tralia and America, the two new quarters which are now 
at work ploughing, sowing, reaping, without a month’s 
intermission, growing corn for us. When you buy a 
bag of flour at the baker’s you pay fivepence over the 
counter, a very simple transaction. Still you do not 
expect to get even that little bag of flour for nothing, 
your fivepence goes over the counter in somebody else’s 
till. Consider now the broad ocean as the counter and 
yourself to represent thirty-five millions of English 
people buying sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen million 
quarters of wheat from the nations opposite, and paying 
for it shiploads of gold. 
So that these sacks of corn in. the market are truly 
filled with gold dust; and how strange it seems at first 
that our farmers, who are for ever dabbling with 
their hands in these golden sands, should be for ever 
grumbling at their poverty ! ‘The nearer the church the 
farther from God’ is an old country proverb ; the nearer 
to wheat the farther from mammon, I may construct as 
an addendum. Quite lately a gentleman told me that 
while he grew wheat on his thousand acres he lost just a 
pound an acre per annum, ze. a thousand a year out of 
capital, so that if he had not happily given up this 
amusement he would now have been in the workhouse 
munching the putty there supplied for bread. 
The rag and bone men go from door to door filling 
an old bag with scraps of linen, and so innumerable 
agents of bankers and financiers, vampires that suck 
