WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 139 
II. 
EVERY day something new is introduced into farming, 
and yet the old things are not driven out. Every one 
knows that steam is now used on the farm for ploughing 
and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead, 
and one would have thought that by this time it would 
have superseded all other motive powers. Yet this very 
day I counted twenty great cart-horses at work in one 
ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to 
harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nine- 
teen were dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of 
limb, standing high up above the level surface of the 
open field, great towers of strength, almost prehistoric 
in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great 
cannon up into a battery on the heights. The day be- 
fore, passing the same farm—it was Sunday—a great 
bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in a corner 
of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, 
and the sun shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had 
been brushed, the long black mane hung over the arch- 
ing neck, the large dark eyes looked at us so quietly—a 
real English picture. The black funnel of the steam- 
engine has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the 
fields. They have been there for centuries, and there 
they stay ; the notched, broad wheel of the steam-plough 
has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth. New 
things come, but the old do not go away. One life is 
‘but a summer’s day compared with the long cycle of 
years of agriculture, and yet it seems that a whole storm, 
as it were, of innovations has burst upon the fields ever 
since I can recollect, and, as, years go, I am still in the 
