210 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



farmer is contented with merely cutting two or three gaps in the 

 watercourse at the top, from which the water flows over the field as 

 it best can, scarcely wetting some parts and making complete pools in 

 others. 



Weeding he considers quite an unnecessary refinement, fit only for 

 those who have plenty of money to waste upon their fancies — except now 

 and then, when the weeds have acquired an alarming preponderance over 

 the crop, he perhaps sets feebly to work to extract the more prominent 

 after they have arrived at maturity and the mischief is done. His potatoes 

 are overrun with persicarias, docks, and spurges ; his wheat and barley 

 with corn cockle, corn scabious, and knapweed, and his pastures with 

 thistles, elecampine, etc., all in the greatest abundance. If you ask him 

 why he leaves his land in such a disgraceful state, and try to impress upon 

 him how much better crops he would have if he cleared it, he will tell you 

 that he does not think they do much harm, and that if he cleaned them 

 this year, there would be as many as ever next year, and, above all, that 

 he can't afford it, asking you where he is to get money to pay people for 

 doing it. 



The poultry, geese, ducks, and fowls are little attended to, being left 

 to pick up their living as well as they can. Geese are fattened by being 

 turned into the corn stubble, the others are generally killed from the yard. 

 The fowls, having no proper places to lay in, are not very profitable with 

 regard to eggs, which have to be hunted for and discovered in all sorts of 

 places. This applies more particularly to Glamorganshire, which is in a 

 great measure supplied with eggs and poultry from Carmarthenshire, or 

 " Sir Gaer " (pronounced there gar)^ as it is called in Welsh, where they 

 manage them much better. 



If there happens to be in the neighbourhood any one who farms on 

 the improved English system, has a proper course of crops, with turnips, 

 etc., folds his sheep, and manages things in a tidy manner, it is impossible 

 to make the Welshman believe that such a way of going on pays ; he will 

 persist that the man is losing money by it all the time, and that he only 

 keeps it on because he is ashamed to confess the failure of his new method. 

 Even should the person go on for many years, to all appearance prosper- 

 ously and in everybody else's eyes be making money by his farm, still the 

 Welshman will declare that he has some other source from which he 

 draws to purchase his dear-bought farming amusement, and that the time 

 will come when he will be obhged to give it up ; and though you tell him 

 that the greater part of the land in England is farmed in that manner, 

 and ask him whether he thinks they can all be foolish enough to go on 

 losing money year after year, he is still incredulous, says that he knows 

 " the nature of farming," and that such work as that can never pay. 

 While the ignorance which causes this incredulity exists, it is evidently a 

 difficult task to improve him. 



