FIRST LITERARY EFFORTS 207 



gets a pretty good crop. The next year he gets a crop of barley with- 

 out any manure whatever, and after that a crop of oats, unmanured. 

 He then leaves the field fallow till the others have been treated in the 

 same manner, and then returns to serve it thus cruelly again ; first, how- 

 ever, getting his potato crop before his wheat. Some, after the third 

 crop (oats), manure the land as well as they can, and sow barley with 

 clover, which they mow and feed off the second year, and then let it 

 remain as pasture for some time; others, again, have three crops of 

 oats in succession after the wheat and barley, and thus render the 

 land utterly useless for many years. 



In this manner the best crops of wheat they can get with abundance 

 of manure, on land above the average quality, is about twenty bushels 

 per acre — ten bushels is, however, more general, and sometimes only 

 seven or eight are obtained. 



The rough pastures on which the cattle get their living and waste 

 their manure a great part of the time consist chiefly of various species 

 of rushes and sedges, a few coarse grasses, and gorse and fern on the 

 drier parts. They are frequently, too, covered with brambles, dwarf 

 willows, and alders. 



The "short-hay meadows," as they are called, are a class of lands 

 entirely unknown in most parts of England; I shall, therefore, en- 

 deavour to describe them. 



They consist of large undulating tracts of lands on the lower slopes 

 of the mountains, covered during autumn, winter, and spring with a 

 very short brownish yellow wet turf. In May, June, and July the 

 various plants forming this turf spring up, and at the end of summer 

 are mown, and form " short-hay " ; and well it deserves the name, for 

 it is frequently almost impossible to take it up with a hayfork, in 

 which case it is raked up and gathered by armfuls into the cars. The 

 produce varies from two to six hundredweight per acre; four may be 

 about the average, or five acres of land to produce a ton of hay. Dur- 

 ing the rest of the year it is almost good for nothing. It is astonish- 

 ing how such stuff can be worth the labour of mowing and making it 

 into hay. An English farmer would certainly not do it, but the poor 

 Welshman has no choice; he must either cut his short-hay or have no 

 food for his cattle in the winter; so he sets to, and sweeps away with 

 his scythe a breadth which would astonish an English mower. 



The soil which produces these meadows is a poor yellow clay rest- 

 ing on the rock; on the surface of the clay is a stratum of peaty 

 vegetable matter, sometimes of considerable thickness though more 

 generally only a few inches, which collects and retains the moisture 

 in a most remarkable manner, so that though the ground should have 

 a very steep slope the water seems to saturate and cling to it like a 

 sponge, so much so that after a considerable period of dry weather, 

 when, from the burnt appearance of the surface, you would imagine 



