Small Holdings in France. 
615 
p.ili., with abundance of milk and white bread, in the villages about 
Sedan. Nor can I doubt that the milk supply in Western France 
is at least as abundant as in the North-East, where the rainfall 
is less. 
With the view of making fresh inquiries in the locality now 
in question, and of acquiring fresh data there for a comparison 
between French peasants and British labourers, I left England for 
Amiens in the early part of May, 1892. The contrast between the 
English and French scenery, as viewed from the railway, was cer- 
tainly very pronounced. Kent was looking veritably the “ garden 
of England,” in its May freshness and habitual neatness. The 
regular lines of fruit plantations and endless intersecting vistas 
of hop-poles, with their network of brown gossamer-like threads, all 
spoke of orderly husbandry and large outlay of capital. As you 
approach nearer the coast you cannot fail to be struck with the 
smoothness of the pastures, the whiteness of the sheep, each with a 
lamb by its side, and the trimness of the fences. Residences of the 
landed gentry are frequent, cottages are neat and substantial, and 
farm buildings are in good repair. 
On the French side of the Channel almost everything in the way 
of buildings that you see from the railway is in bad repair and untidy. 
The fences are untrimmed and display frequent gaps, and the outlook 
is generally dreary. Long rows of liimsy cottages, with no upstair 
bedrooms, and neglected waste ground, instead of flower gardens, about 
them, tell of the unloveliness of the lives of the inmates. Sandy tracts, 
flat low-lyirg pastures intersected by straight-cut ditches, and long- 
drawn-out swamps, fringed with poplars, make up the main features of 
the landscape between Boulogne and Amiens. We are certainly not 
in the garden of France here. One would be quite inclined to accept 
as literally true the reports referred to above, if one went no 
farther than this. 
But you have only to ascend, on either side, out of the low-lying 
ground — it hardly deserves the name of valley — followed by the 
railway, when you find the scene suddenly changed. Once at the 
top of the ascent, you see stretched out before you a vast undulating 
plateau, cut up into endless narrow strips of many colours, bright 
green predominating at the spring season. No kind of fence, hedge, 
or single trees are anywhere to be descried amongst the cultivated 
patches, and not even grass “ balks ” divide the strips where the ground 
is flat. There is nothing, in square miles of plain, behind which man 
or beast could hide or on which bird could alight. Where the 
ground is hilly it is cut into successions of terraces, connected by 
low grass banks (called rideaux in Picardy), and proclaiming the 
wide diffusion hereabouts of the common field system of agriculture, 
so admirably treated of by Mr. F. Seebohm in his English Village 
Community. Absolutely unbroken by any outstanding object as 
are the wide expanses of patchwork cultivation, most of the summits 
of the rolling ground are crowned with woods, now in their freshest 
green, and all the villages are embowered in plantations and 
orchards. The general effect of the concentration of the trees into 
VOL. III. T. t). — 11 u U 
