Sufjgested Improvements. 
321 
icatercresses must not be forgotten. The watercress-gatherer of 
Goldsmith's ' Deserted Village ' was a decrepit old woman : — 
" Yon widowed, solitary thing, 
That feebly bends beside the plashy spring, 
Siie, wretched matron, forced in age, lor bread, 
To strip the brooli witli mantling cresses spread." 
Cresses used to belong to nobody ; stealing them was no rob- 
bery. Now they arc; valuable property, and regularly cultivatetl 
for the London market, where they are sold in penny and half- 
penny bunches. Land, previously little esteemed, fetches lOZ., 
and even more, an acre. I have heard of a swampy five-acre 
piece of ground, full of springs, never valued with the farm, 
which now lets for 45Z. a year, and will be worth 50/. An offer 
of 300/, a year has been made for a bad water-meadow of 20 
acres. There are cress-grounds at Andwell, Itchingwell, Laver- 
stoke. Old Basing, and elsewhere. They require some prepara- 
tion. The surface is first levelled ; channels are then made, in 
which the water (chalk-water is prefeired) is kept slowly running 
two or three inches deep. The soil from the channels is thrown 
up into beds : in the channels the cresses grow, on the beds 
osiers. Thus every part is turned to account. 
4. There is an improvement which has been " lately intro- 
duced " in most parts of the county, but which is " still re([uired " 
in others — the application of farmyard-dung to the xoheat-crop. A 
few years since, the farmyard-dung was exclusively applied to 
the turnips, thus making them the foundation of the rotation. 
But turnips require manure in an immediately available shape, 
z. c, rotten dung, which, however, implies frequent turning in 
mixens, and consequent loss of ammonia, whereas wheat, which 
is much longer in the ground, does not require an immediate 
stimulus (which would force vegetation, and make it winter- 
proud), so that if green, unturned, unfermented dung be applied 
to it, labour and expense are saved, ammonia is retained, and 
the virtues of the manure come into action just when the plant 
wants them, as it is approaching maturity. As to the turnips, 
soluble superphosphate will give the rapid start, and bones 
maintain the growth, which these ravenous feeders once deiived, 
at much waste and cost, from black rotten dung. 
5. There are not two opinions on the paramount importance 
of chalJiing in this county. " It will make clay ground work 
like a bed of ashes," said one man to me. " Blindfold a plough- 
man, and he will tell you when the plough in his hands enters 
the chalked ground," said another. " In a field which I chalked, 
there were some rails (to protect a quickset hedge) which pre- 
vented me from chalking that part ; after five years, my hedge 
was grown, the rails removed, and the whole field, similarly 
