EXPERIMENTS AT I SLIP. 
259 
growing in their new gardens. All the details of their 
journey were carefully planned and personally super¬ 
intended by the Dean. Vans met the emigrants at 
Paddington, and they were driven to the Deanery and 
hospitably entertained before going down to the docks 
for embarkation. “ Be um aloive ? ” was the general 
exclamation as Buckland’s country friends passed the 
Horse Guards sentries and saw London for the first 
time. 
The family usually spent the summer and autumn 
months at I slip; and soon after taking up their residence 
at this pretty Rectory, schemes were set on foot for the 
good of the villagers. The Dean provided allotments 
for the labourers and directed how to lay them out. 
Many a summer evening was spent in chatting with 
and advising the labourers about the cultivation of these 
plots, and gaining from their practical experience much 
useful agricultural information. He would show them the 
result of the experiments he had made in a piece of 
ground, adjoining the allotments, which he rented for the 
purpose. Here, as formerly at Marsh Gibbon, experiments 
of one kind or another were always being made. Even 
the turf of Christ Church was, in former days, turned to 
useful account by the enthusiastic and practical farmer. 
Canon Jelf of Rochester, the son of Buckland’s next-door 
neighbour as Canon of Christ Church, remembers an 
agricultural feat of the future Dean’s. On the turf in Tom 
Quad, he sowed the word “ guano ” in this material, which 
had just begun to be imported from a Pacific island 
frequented by birds, and in due course the brilliant 
