2G8 The Development of Agricultural Machinery. 
locality that the problem had been solved, and that pipes had 
been made without a wheel, which stood the kiln as uncon- 
cernedly as did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego ; but no one 
could point out on the map the exact spot where this wonder 
was worked. Strolling one day, however, down a little-used 
drove-way on the northern slope of the Chiltern Hills, in Bed- 
fordshire, I beheld a square wooden tower, about the size of 
Punch and Judy, approaching me, propelled by a pair of dirty 
' high-lows,' belonging to some one inside the box. ' Codlin ' 
might be within, but ' Short ' and the drum were absent ; more- 
over, the tower was draped with dirty canvas and appeared 
more burdensome than the 1 Thespian ' property ; so that I soon 
became satisfied it was some other concern. 1 Hallo ! ' I cried, 
' what's this ? ' when a gruff voice promptly replied, ' What's 
that to you ? ' whereupon I went off, unenlightened and dis- 
couraged. That evening, however, I found the village deeply 
moved by the intelligence that, in a brick-yard, three miles 
distant, a lot of drain-pipes might be seen, ' round "uns, like 
poipes, as a chap had made in a box all by his self. He 
wouldn't let no one see the box, and he'd gone off as soon as 
he'd got his money.' 1 saw the ' poipes ' next day, and, within 
a month, had seen the wonderful box and made another like it. 
Needless to say, this was a pipe-die machine of the simplest 
possible construction, but with this apparatus I made 13,000 
pipes with my own hands, the first drain-pipes, as I believe, 
ever made in Cambridgeshire." 
The portable steam-engine and threshing-machine began to 
attract abnormal attention about 184-7. In 184-2 Judges had, 
indeed, expressed serious doubts whether steam could ever be 
successfully applied to the driving of barn works, and, as yet, 
no one dreamed of out-of-door threshing. But, in 1847, seven 
engines and threshing-machines were set to work in the Society's 
yard. No tests were applied, and the proceedings evidently 
became alarming to all concerned ; the machines, in the Judges' 
opinion, being driven at much too high a speed, and one of 
them being smashed to atoms. But in the following year (184-8) 
Mr. Amos and Mr. Thompson, with the newly-born dynamo- 
meter in their hands, put no less than ten engines and thresh- 
ing-machines through their paces, only to prove, in 181-9, that 
three-fourths of the power absorbed by the best barn-works 
were expended in driving the machinery, while only one-fourth 
of such power was utilised for the work of threshing. Hence- 
forward, and for some years (or, say, from 1847 to 1851), a 
thrilling interest centred around the whole question of steam- 
threshing, which only abated with the comparative perfecting 
