CHAPTER I.

MOTIVES TO THE WALK—THE IRON HORSE AND HIS RIDER—THE LOSSES AND GAINS BY SPEED—THE RAILWAY TRACK AND TURNPIKE ROAD: THEIR SCENERIES COMPARED.

One of my motives for making this tour was to look at the country towns and villages on the way in the face and eyes; to enter them by the front door, and to see them as they were made to be seen first, as far as man’s mind and hand intended and wrought.  Railway travelling, as yet, takes everything at a disadvantage; it does not front on nature, or art, or the common conditions and industries of men in town or country.  If it does not actually of itself turn, it presents everything the wrong side outward.  In cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship of tumble-down out-houses, and mysteries of cellar and back-kitchen life which were never intended for other eyes than those that grope in them by day or night.  How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is the fiery locomotion of the Iron Horse through these densely-peopled towns! now the screech, the roar, and the darkness of cavernous passages under paved streets, church vaults, and an acre or two of three-story brick houses, with the feeling of a world of breathing, bustling humanity incumbent upon you;—now the dash and flash out into the light, and the higgledy-piggledy glimpses of the next five minutes.  In a moment you are above thickly-thronged streets, and the houses on either side, looking down into the black throats of smoky chimneys; into the garret lairs of poverty, sickness, and sin; down lower upon squads of children trying to play in back-yards eight feet square.  It is all wrong, except in the single quality of speed.  You enter the town as you would a farmer’s house, if you first passed through the pig-stye into the kitchen.  Every respectable house in the city turns its back upon you; and often a very brick and dirty back too, though it may show an elegant front of Bath or Portland stone to the street it faces.  All the respectable streets run over or under you with an audible shudder of disgust or dread.  None but a shabby lane of low shops for the sale of junk, beer, onions, shrimps, and cabbages, will run a third of a mile by your side for the sake of your company.  The wickedest boys in the town hoot at you, with most ignominious and satiric antics, as you pass; and if they do not shie stones in upon you, or dead cats, it is more from fear of the beadle or the constable than out of respect for your business or pleasure.

Indeed, every town and village, great or small, which you pass through or near on the railway, looks as if you came fifty years before you were expected.  It says, in all the legible expressions of its countenance, “Lack-a-day!—if here isn’t that creature come already, and looking in at my back door before I had time to turn around, or put anything in shape!”  The Iron Horse himself gets no sympathy nor humane admiration.  He stands grim and wrathy, when reined up for two minutes and forty-five seconds at a station.  No venturesome boys pat him on the flanks, or look kindly into his eyes, or say a pleasant word to him, or even wonder if he is tired, or thirsty, or hungry.  None of the ostlers of the greasy stables, in which the locomotives are housed, ever call him Dobbin, or Old Jack, or Jenny, or say, “Well done, old fellow!” when they unhitch him from the train at midnight, after a journey of a hundred leagues.  His driver is a real man of flesh and blood; with wife and children whom he loves.  He goes on Sunday to church, and, maybe, sings the psalms of David, and listens devoutly to the sermon, and says prayers at home, and the few who know him speak well of him, as a good and proper man in his way.  But, spurred and mounted upon the saddle of the great iron hexiped, nearly all the passengers regard him as a part of the beast.  No one speaks to him, or thinks of him on the journey.  He may pull up at fifty stations, and not a soul among the Firsts, Seconds, or even Thirds, will offer him a glass of beer, or pipe-full of tobacco, or give him a sixpence at the end of the ride for extra speed or care.  His face is grimy, and greasy, and black.  All his motions are ambiguous and awkward to the casual observer.  He has none of the sedate and conscious dignity of his predecessor on the old stage-coach box.  He handles no whip, like him, with easy grace.  Indeed, in putting up his great beast to its best speed, he “hides his whip in the manger,” according to a proverb older than steam power.  He wears no gloves in the coldest weather; not always a coat, and never a decent one, at his work.  He blows no cheery music out of a brass bugle as he approaches a town, but pricks the loins of the fiery beast, and makes him scream with a sound between a human whistle and an alligator’s croak.  He never pulls up abreast of the station-house door, in the fashion of the old coach driver, to show off himself and his leaders, but runs on several rods ahead of his passengers and spectators, as if to be clear of them and their comments, good or bad.  At the end of the journey, be it at midnight or day-break, not a man nor a woman he has driven safely at the rate of forty miles an hour thinks or cares what becomes of him, or separates him in thought from the great iron monster he mounts.  Not the smock-frocked man, getting out of the forwardmost Third, with his stick and bundle, thinks of him, or stops a moment to see him back out and turn into the stable.

With all the practical advantages of this machine propulsion at bird speed over space, it confounds and swallows up the poetical aspects and picturesque sceneries that were the charm of old-fashioned travelling in the country.  The most beautiful landscapes rotate around a locomotive axis confusedly.  Green pastures and yellow wheat fields are in a whirl.  Tall and venerable trees get into the wake of the same motion, and the large, pied cows ruminating in their shade, seem to lie on the revolving arc of an indefinite circle.  The views dissolve before their best aspect is caught by the eye.  The flowers, like Eastern beauties, can only be seen “half hidden and half revealed,” in the general unsteadiness.  As for bees, you cannot hear or see them at all; and the songs of the happiest birds are drowned altogether by the clatter of a hundred wheels on the metal track.  If there are any poor, flat, or fen lands, your way is sure to lie through them.  In a picturesque and undulating country, studded with parks and mansions of wealth and taste, you are plunging through a long, dark tunnel, or walled into a deep cut, before your eye can catch the view that dashes by your carriage window.  If you have a utilitarian proclivity and purpose, and would like to see the great agricultural industries of the country, they present themselves to you in as confused aspects as the sceneries of the passing landscape.  The face of every farm is turned from you.  The farmer’s house fronts on the turnpike road, and the best views of his homestead, of his industry, prosperity, and happiness, look that way.  You only get a furtive glance, a kind of clandestine and diagonal peep at him and his doings; and having thus travelled a hundred miles through a fertile country you can form no approximate or satisfactory idea of its character and productions.

But no facts nor arguments are needed to convince an intelligent traveller that the railway affords no point of view for seeing town or country to any satisfactory perception of its character.  Indeed, neither coach of the olden, nor cab of the modern vogue, nor saddle, will enable one to “do” either town or country with thorough insight and enjoyment.  It takes him too long to pull up to catch the features of a sudden view.  He can do nothing with those generous and delightful institutions of Old England,—the footpaths, that thread pasture, park, and field, seemingly permeating her whole green world with dusky veins for the circulation of human life.  To lose all the picturesque lanes and landscapes which these field-paths cross and command, is to lose the great distinctive charm of the country.  Then, neither from the coach-box nor the saddle can he make much conversation on the way.  He loses the chance of a thousand little talks and pleasant incidents.  He cannot say “Good morning” to the farmer at the stile, nor a word of greeting to the reapers over the hedge, nor see where they live, and the kind of children that play by their cottage doors; nor the little, antique churches, bearded to their eye-brows with ivy, covering the wrinkles of half a dozen centuries, nor the low and quiet villages clustering around, each like a family of bushy-headed children surrounding their venerable mother.

In addition to these considerations, there was another that moved me to this walk.  Although I had been up and down the country as often and as extensively as any American, perhaps, and admired its general scenery, I had never looked at it with an agricultural eye or interest.  But, having dabbled a little in farming in the interval between my last two visits to England, and being touched with some of the enthusiasm that modern novices carry into the occupation, I was determined to look at the agriculture of Great Britain more leisurely and attentively, and from a better stand-point than I had ever done before.  The thought had also occurred to me, that a walk through the best agricultural counties of England and Scotland would afford opportunity for observation which might be made of some interest to my friends and neighbor farmers in America as well as to myself.  Therefore I beg the English reader to remember that I am addressing to them the notes that I may make by the way, hoping that its incidents and the thoughts it suggests will not be devoid of interest because they are principally intended for the American ear.

CHAPTER II.

FIRST DAY’S OBSERVATIONS AND ENJOYMENT—RURAL FOOT-PATHS; VISIT TO TIPTREE FARM—ALDERMAN MECHI’S OPERATIONS—IMPROVEMENTS INTRODUCED, DECRIED, AND ADOPTED—STEAM POWER, UNDER-DRAINING, DEEP TILLAGE, IRRIGATION—PRACTICAL RESULTS.

On Wednesday, July 15th, 1863, I left London with the hope that I might be able to accomplish the northern half of my proposed “Walk from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s.”  I had been practically prostrated by a serious indisposition for nearly two months, and was just able to walk one or two miles at a time about the city.  Believing that country air and exercise would soon enable me to be longer on my feet, I concluded to set out as I was, without waiting for additional strength, so slow and difficult to attain in the smoky atmosphere and hot streets of London.

Few reading farmers in America there are who are not familiar with the name and fame of Alderman Mechi, as an agriculturist of that new and scientific school that is making such a revolution in the great primeval industry of mankind.  His experiments on his Tiptree Farm have attained a world-wide publicity, and have given that homestead an interest that, perhaps, never attached to the same number of acres in any country or age.  Thinking that this famous establishment would be a good starting point for my pedestrian tour, I concluded to proceed thither first by railway, and thence to walk northward, by easy stages, through the fertile and rural county of Essex.  Taking an afternoon train, I reached Kelvedon about 5 p.m.,—the station for Tiptree, and a good specimen of an English village, at two hours’ ride from London.  Calling at the residence of a Friend, or Quaker, to inquire the way to the Alderman’s farm, he invited me to take tea with him, and be his guest for the night,—a hospitality which I very gladly accepted, as it was a longer walk than I had anticipated.  After tea, my host, who was a farmer as well as miller, took me over his fields, and showed me his live stock, his crops of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and roots, which were all large and luxuriant, and looked a tableau vivant of plenty within the green hedges that enclosed and adorned them.

The next morning, after breakfast, my kind host set me on the way to Tiptree by a footpath through alternating fields of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and turnips, into which an English farm is generally divided.  These footpaths are among the vested interests of the walking public throughout the United Kingdom.  Most of them are centuries old.  The footsteps of a dozen generations have given them the force and sanctity of a popular right.  A farmer might as well undertake to barricade the turnpike road as to close one of these old paths across his best fields.  So far from obstructing them, he finds it good policy to straighten and round them up, and supply them with convenient gates or stiles, so that no one shall have an excuse for trampling on his crops, or for diverging into the open field for a shorter cut to the main road.  Blessings on the man who invented them!  It was done when land was cheap, and public roads were few; before four wheels were first geared together for business or pleasure.  They were the doing of another age; this would not have produced them.  They run through all the prose, poetry, and romance of the rural life of England, permeating the history of green hedges, thatched cottages, morning songs of the lark, moonlight walks, meetings at the stile, harvest homes of long ago, and many a romantic narrative of human experience widely read in both hemispheres.  They will run on for ever, carrying with them the same associations.  They are the inheritance of landless millions, who have trodden them in ages past at dawn, noon, and night, to and from their labor; and in ages to come the mowers and reapers shall tread them to the morning music of the lark, and through Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, they shall show the fresh checker-work of the ploughman’s hob-nailed shoe.  The surreptitious innovations of utilitarian science shall not poach upon these sacred preserves of the people, whatever revolutions they may produce in the machinery and speed of turnpike locomotion.  These pleasant and peaceful paths through park, and pasture, meandering through the beautiful and sweet-breathing artistry of English agriculture, are guaranteed to future generations by an authority which no legislation can annul.

A walk of a few miles brought me in sight of Tiptree Hall; and its first aspect relieved my mind of an impression which, in common with thousands better informed, I had entertained in reference to the establishment.  An idea has generally prevailed among English farmers, and agriculturists of other countries who have heard of Alderman Mechi’s experiments, that they were impracticable and almost valueless, because they would not pay; that the balance-sheet of his operations did and must ever show such ruinous discrepancy between income and expenditure as must deter any man, of less capital and reckless enthusiasm, from following his lead into such unconsidered ventures.  In short, he has been widely regarded at home and abroad as a bold and dashing novice in agricultural experience, ready to lavish upon his own hasty inventions a fortune acquired in his London warehouse; and all this to make himself famous as a great light in the agricultural world, which light, after all, was a mere will-o’-the-wisp sort of affair, leading its dupes into the veriest bog of bankruptcy.  In common with all those bold, self-reliant spirits that have ventured to break away from the antecedents of public opinion and custom, he has been the subject of many ungenerous innuendoes and criticisms.  All kinds of ambitions and motives have been ascribed to him.  Many a burly, red-faced farmer, who boasts of an unbroken agricultural lineage reaching back into the reign of Good Queen Bess, will tell you over his beer that the Alderman’s doings are all gammon; that they are all to advertise his cutlery business in Leadenhall Street, Barnum fashion; to inveigle down to Tiptree Hall noblemen, foreign ambassadors, and great people of different countries, and bribe “an honourable mention” out of them with champagne treats and oyster suppers.  Indeed, my Quaker host largely participated in this opinion, and took no pains to conceal it when speaking of his enterprising neighbor.

From what I had read and heard of the Tiptree Hall estate, I expected to see a grand, old, baronial mansion, surrounded with elegant and costly buildings for housing horses, cattle, sheep, and other live stock, all erected on a scale which no bona fide farmer could adopt or approximately imitate.  In a word, I fancied his barns and stables would even surpass in this respect the establishments of some of those most wealthy New York or Boston merchants, who think they are stimulating country farmers to healthy emulation by lavishing from thirty to forty thousand dollars on a barn and its appurtenant out-houses.  With these preconceived ideas, it was an unexpected satisfaction to see quite a simple-looking, unassuming establishment, which any well-to-do farmer might make and own.  The house is rather a large and solid-looking building, erected by Mr. Mechi himself, but not at all ostentatious of wealth or architectural taste.  The barns and “steddings,” or what we call cowhouses in America, are of a very ordinary cast, or such as any country-bred farmer would call economical and simple.  The homestead occupies no picturesque site, and commands no interesting scenery.  The farm consists of about 170 acres, which, in England, is regarded as a rather small holding.  The land is naturally sterile and hard of cultivation, most of it apparently being heavily mixed with ferruginous matter.  When ploughed deeply, the clods turned up look frequently like compact masses of iron ore.  Every experienced farmer knows the natural poverty of such a soil, and the hard labor to man and beast it costs to till it.

To my great regret, Mr. Mechi was not at home, though he passes most of his time in Summer at Tiptree.  But his foreman, who enters into all the experiments and operations which have made the establishment so famous, with almost equal interest and enthusiasm, took me through the farm buildings, and all the fields, and showed me the whole process and machinery employed.  Any English or American agriculturist who has read of Alderman Mechi’s operations, would be inclined to ask, on looking, for the first time, at his buildings and the fields surrounding them, what is the great distinguishing speciality of his enterprise.  His land is poor; his housings are simple; there is no outside show of uncommon taste or genius.  Every acre is tile-drained, to be sure.  But that is nothing new nor uncommon.  Drainage is the order of the day.  Any tenant farmer in England can have his land drained by the Government by paying six per cent. annually on the cost of the job.  His expenditure for artificial manure does not exceed that of hundreds of good farmers.  He carries out the deep tillage system most liberally.  So do other scientific agriculturalists in Europe and America.  Of course, a few hours’ observation would not suffice for a full and correct conclusion on this point, but it gave me the impression that the great operation which has won for the Tiptree Farm its special distinction is its irrigation with liquid manure.  In this respect it stands unrivalled, and, perhaps, unimitated.  And this, probably, is the head and front of his offending to those who criticise his economy and decry his experiments.

This irrigation is performed through the medium of a small steam engine and sixteen hydrants, so posted and supplied with hose as to reach every square foot of the 170 acres.  The water used for this purpose is mostly, if not entirely, supplied from the draining pipes, even in the dryest season.  The manure thus liquified is made by a comparatively small number of animals.  Calves to the value of £50 are bought, and fat stock to that of £500 are sold annually.  They are all stabled throughout the year, except in harvest time, when they are turned out for a few weeks to rowen feed.  The calves are housed until a year old in a large stedding by themselves.  They are then transferred to another building, and put upon “the boards;” that is in a long stable or cowhouse, with a flooring of slats, through which the manure drops into a cellar below, made water-tight.  Here the busiest little engine in the world is brought to bear upon it, with all its faculties of suction and propulsion.  Through one pipe it forces fresh water in upon this mass of manure, which, when liquified, runs down into a subterranean cistern or reservoir capable of holding over 100,000 gallons.  From this it is propelled into any field to be irrigated.  To prevent any sediment in the great reservoir, or to make an even mixture of the liquified manure, a hose is attached to the engine, and the other end dropped into the mass.  Through this a constant volume of air is propelled with such force as to set the whole boiling and foaming like a little cataract.  One man at the engine and two at the hose in the distant field perform the whole operation.  The chapped and “baky” surface of the farm is thus softened and enriched at will, and rendered productive.

Now, this operation seems to constitute the present distinctive speciality of Alderman Mechi’s Tiptree Farm.  Will it pay? ask a thousand voices.  In how many years will he get his money back?  Give us the balance sheet of the experiment.  A New Englander, favorably impressed with the process, would be likely to answer these questions by another, and ask, will drainage pay?  Not in one year, assuredly, nor in five; not in ten, perhaps.  The British Government assumes that all the expenditure upon under-drainage will be paid back in fifteen or twenty years at the farthest.  It lends money to the land-owner on this basis; and the land-owner stipulates with his tenant that he shall reimburse him by annual instalments of six or seven per cent. until the whole cost of the operation is liquidated.  Thus the tenant-farmer is willing to pay six, sometimes seven per cent. annually, for twenty years, for the increased capacity of production which drainage gives to the farm he cultivates.  At the end of that period the Government is paid by the landlord, and the landlord by the tenant, and the tenant by his augmented crops for the whole original outlay upon the land.  For aught either of the three parties to the operation knows to the contrary, it must all be done over again at the end of twenty years.  The system is too young yet, even in England, for any one to say how long a course of tubing will last, or how often it must be relaid.

One point, therefore, has been gained.  No intelligent English farmer, who has tried the system, now asks if under-drainage will pay; nor does he expect that it will pay back the whole expenditure in less than twelve or fifteen years.  Here is a generous faith in the operation on the side of all the parties concerned.  Then why should not Alderman Mechi’s irrigation system be put on the same footing, in the matter of public confidence?  It is nothing very uncommon even for a two-hundred-acre farmer in England to have a small stationary or locomotive steam-engine, and to find plenty of work for it, too, in threshing his grain, grinding his fodder, pulping his roots, cutting his hay and straw, and for other purposes.  Mr. Mechi would doubtless have one for these objects alone.  So its cost must not be charged to the account of irrigation.  A single course of iron tubing, a third of a mile long, reaching to the centre of his farthest field, cannot cost more, with all the hose employed, than the drainage of that field, while it would be fair to assume that the iron pipes will last twice as long as those of burnt clay.  They might fairly be expected to hold good for forty years.  If, then, for this period, or less, the process yields ten per cent. of increased production annually, over and above the effect of all other means employed, it is quite evident that it will pay as well as drainage.

But does it augment the yearly production of the farm by this amount?  To say that it is the only process by which the baky and chappy soil of Tiptree can be thoroughly fertilised, would not suffice to prove its necessity or value to other soils of different composition.  One fact, however, may be sufficient to determine its virtue.  The fields of clover, and Italian rye-grass, etc., are mown three and even four times in one season, and afterwards fed with sheep.  Certainly, no other system could produce all this cropping.  The distinctive difference it makes in other crops cannot, perhaps, be made so palpable.  The wheat looked strong and heavy, with a fair promise of forty-five bushels to an acre.  The oats, beans, and roots showed equally well.

The irrigation and deep tillage systems were going on simultaneously in the same field, affording me a good opportunity of seeing the operation of both.  Two men were plying the hose upon a portion of the field which had already been mowed three times.  Two teams were at work turning up the other, which had already been cropped once or twice.  One of two horses went first, and, with a common English plough, turned an ordinary furrow.  Then the other followed, of twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil plough held to the work beam-deep.  The iron-stones and ferruginous clods turned up by this “deep tillage” would make a prairie farmer of Illinois wonder, if not shudder, at the plucky and ingenious industry which competes with his easy toil and cheap land in providing bread for the landless millions of Great Britain.

The only exceptional feature or arrangement, besides the irrigating machinery and process, that I noticed, was an iron hurdling for folding sheep.  This, at first sight, might look to a practical farmer a little extravagant, indicating a city origin, or the notion of an amateur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of the necessary.  Each length of this iron fencing is apparently about a rod, and cost £1, or nearly five dollars.  It is fitted to low wheels, or rollers, on an axle two or three feet in length, so that it can be moved easily and quickly in any direction.  It would cost over fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose an acre entirely with this kind of hurdling.  Still, Mr. Mechi would doubtless be able to show that this large expenditure is a good investment, and pays well in the long run.  The folding of sheep for twenty-four or forty-eight hours on small patches of clover, trefoil, or turnips, is a very important department of English farming, both for fattening them for the market and for putting the land in better heart than any other fertilising process could effect.  Now, a man with this iron fencing on wheels must be able to make in two hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more of busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.

On the whole, a practical farmer, who has no other source of income than the single occupation of agriculture, would be likely to ask, what is the realised value of Alderman Mechi’s operations to the common grain and stock-growers of the world?  They have excited more attention or curiosity than any other experiments of the present day; but what is the real resume of their results?  What new principles has he laid down; what new economy has he reduced to a science that may be profitably utilised by the million who get their living by farming?  What has he actually done that anybody else has adopted or imitated to any tangible advantage?  These are important questions; and this is the way he undertakes to answer them, beginning with the last.

About twenty years ago, he inaugurated the system of under-draining the heavy tile-clay lands in Essex.  Up to his experiment, the process was deemed impracticable and worthless by the most intelligent farmers of the county.  It was more confidently decried than his present irrigation system.  The water would never find its way down into the drain-pipes through such clay.  It stood to reason that it would do no such thing.  Did not the water stand in the track of the horse’s hoof in such rich clay until evaporated by the sun?  It might as well leak through an earthenware basin.  It was all nonsense to bury a man’s money in that style.  He never would see a shilling of it back again.  In the face of these opinions, Mr. Mechi went on, training his pipes through field after field, deep below the surface.  And the water percolated through the clay into them, until all these long veins formed a continuous and rushing stream into the main artery that now furnishes an ample supply for his stabled cattle, for his steam engine, and for all the barn-yard wants.  His tile-draining of clay-lands was a capital success; and those who derided and opposed it have now adopted it to their great advantage, and to the vast augmentation of the value and production of the county.  Here, then, is one thing in which he has led, and others have followed to a great practical result.

His next leading was in the way of agricultural machinery.  He first introduced a steam engine for farming purposes in a district containing a million of acres.  That, too, at the outset, was a fantastic vagary in the opinion of thousands of solid and respectable farmers.  They insisted the Iron Horse would be as dangerous in the barn-yard or rick-yard as the very dragon in Scripture; that he would set everything on fire; kill the men who had care of him; burst and blow up himself and all the buildings into the air; that all the horses, cows, and sheep would be frightened to death at the very sight of the monster, and never could be brought to lie down in peace and safety by his side, even when his blood was cold, and when he was fast asleep.  To think of it! to have a tall chimney towering up over a barn-gable or barn-yard, and puffing out black coal smoke, cotton-factory-wise!  Pretty talk! pretty terms to train an honest and virtuous farmer to mouth!  Wouldn’t it be edifying to hear him string the yarn of these new words! to hear him tell of his engineer and ploughman; of his pokers and pitchforks; of six-horse power, valves, revolutions, stopcocks, twenty pounds of steam, etc.; mixing up all this ridiculous stuff with yearling-calves, turnips, horse-carts, oil-cake, wool, bullocks, beans, and sheep, and other vital things and interests, which forty centuries have looked upon with reverence!  To plough, thresh, cut turnips, grind corn, and pump water for cattle by steam!  What next?

Why, next, the farmers of the region round about

     “First pitied, then embraced”

this new and powerful auxiliary to agricultural industry, after having watched its working and its worth.  And now, thanks to such bold and spirited novices as Mr. Mechi—men who had the pluck to work steadily on under the pattering rain of derisive epithets—there are already nearly as many steam engines working at farm labor between Land’s End and John O’Groat’s as there are employed in the manufacture of cotton in Great Britain.

His irrigation system will doubtless be followed in the same order and interval by those who have pooh-poohed it with the same derision and incredulity as the other innovations they have already adopted.  The utilising of the sewage of large towns, especially of London, has now become a prominent idea and movement.  Mr. Mechi’s machinery and process are admirably adapted to the work of distributing a river of this fertilising material over any farm to which it may be conducted.  Thus, there is good reason to believe that the very process he originated for softening and enriching the hard and sterile acres of his small farm in Essex will be adopted for saturating millions of acres in Great Britain with the millions of tons of manurial matter that have hitherto blackened and poisoned the rivers of the country on their wasteful way to the sea.  This will be only an additional work for the farm engines now in operation, accomplished with but little increased expense.  A single fact may illustrate the irrigating capacity of Mr. Mechi’s machinery.  It throws upon a field a quantity of the fertilising fluid equal to one inch of rainfall at a time, or 100 tons per imperial acre.  And, as a proof of how deep it penetrates, the drains run freely with it, thus showing conclusively that the subsoil has been well saturated, a point of vital importance to the crop.

Deep tillage is another speciality that distinguished the Tiptree Farm regime at the beginning, in which Mr. Mechi led, and in which he has been followed by the farmers of the country, although few have come up abreast of him as yet in the system.

Here, then, are four specific departments of improvement in agricultural industry which the Alderman has introduced.  Every one of them has been ridiculed as an impracticable and useless innovation in its turn.  Three of them have already been adopted, and virtually incorporated with agricultural science and economy; and the fourth, or irrigation by steam power, bids fair to find as much favor, and as many adherents in the end as the others have done.

He has not only originated these improvements, or been the first to give them practical experiment, but he has laid down certain principles which will doubtless exercise much influence in shaping the industrial economy of agriculture hereafter in different countries.  One of the best of these principles he puts in the form of a mathematical proposition.  Thus:—As the meat is to the manure, so is the crop to the land.  Tell me, he says, how much meat you make, and I will tell you how much corn you make, to the acre.  Meat, then, is the starting point with him; the basis of his annual production, to which he looks for a satisfactory decision of his balance-sheet.  To show the value he attaches to this element, the fact will suffice that he usually keeps 65 bullocks, cows, and calves, 100 sheep, and a number of pigs, besides his horses, making one head to every acre of his farm.  With this amount of live stock he makes from £4 to £5 worth of meat per acre annually.  Perhaps it would be safe to say that no other 170 acres of land in the world make more meat, manure, and grain in the year than the Tiptree Farm.  In these results Mr. Mechi thinks his experiments and improvements have proved

     Quod es demonstrandum.

Having gone over the farm pretty thoroughly, and noticed all the leading features of the establishment, I was requested by the foreman to enter my name in the visitor’s book kept in his neat cottage parlor.  It is a large volume, with the ruling running across both the wide pages; the left apportioned to name, town, country, and profession; the right to remarks of the visitor.  It is truly a remarkable book of interesting autographs and observations, which the philologist as well as agriculturist might pore over with lively satisfaction.  It not only contains the names and comments of many of the most distinguished personages in Great Britain, but those of all other countries of Europe, even of Asia and Africa, as well as America.  Foreign ambassadors, Continental savans, men of fame in the literary, scientific, and political world have here recorded their names and impressions in the most unique succession and blending.  Here, under one date, is a party of Italian gentlemen, leaving their autographs and their observations in the softest syllables of their language.  Then several German connoisseurs follow in their peculiar script, with comments worded heavily with hard-mouthed consonants.  Then comes, perhaps, a single Russian nobleman, who expresses his profound satisfaction in the politest French.  Next succeed three or four Spanish Dons, with a long fence of names attached to each, who give their views of the establishment in the grave, sonorous words of their language.  Here, now, an American puts in his autograph, with his sharp, curt notion of the matter, as “first-rate.”  Very likely a turbaned Mufti or Singh of the Oriental world follows the New England farmer.  Danish and Swedish knights prolong the procession, mingling with Australian wool-growers, Members of the French Royal Academy, Canadian timber-merchants, Dutch Mynheers, Brazilian coffee-planters, Belgian lace-makers, and the representatives of all other countries and professions in Christendom.  An autograph-monger, with the mania strong upon him, of unscrupulous curiosity, armed furtively with a keen pair of scissors would be a dangerous person to admit to the presence of that big book without a policeman at his elbow.

Tiptree Hall has its own literature also, in two or three volumes, written by Mr. Mechi himself, and describing fully his agricultural experience and experiments, and giving facts and arguments which every English and American farmer might study with profit.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN BIRDS.

     “What thou art we know not;
      What is most like thee?
      From rainbow clouds there flow not
      Drops so bright to see,
      As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.”
                                 SHELLEY’S “SKYLARK.”

     “Do you ne’er think what wondrous beings these?
      Do you ne’er think who made them, and who taught
      The dialect they speak, whose melodies
      Alone are the interpreters of thought?
      Whose household words are songs in many keys,
      Sweeter than instrument of man e’er caught!
      Whose habitations in the tree-tops, even,
      Are half-way houses on the road to heaven.”
                                           LONGFELLOW.

Having spent a couple of hours very pleasantly at Tiptree Hall, I turned my face in a northerly direction for a walk through the best agricultural section of Essex.  While passing through a grass field recently mown, a lark flew up from almost under my feet.  And there, partially overarched by a tuft of clover, was her little all of earth—a snug, warm nest with two small eggs in it, about the size and color of those of the ground-chirping-bird of New England, which is nearer the English lark than any other American bird.  I bent down to look at them with an interest an American could only feel.  To him the lark is to the bird-world’s companionship and music what the angels are to the spirit land.  He has read and dreamed of both from his childhood up.  He has believed in both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost positively, as real and beautiful individualities.  He almost credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hearing “the downward beat of angel wings.”  In his facile faith in the substance of picturesque and happy shadows, he sometimes tries to believe that the phœnix may have been, in some age and country, a real, living bird, of flesh and blood and genuine feathers, with long, strong wings, capable of performing the strange psychological feats ascribed to it in that most edifying picture emblazoned on the arms of Banking Companies, Insurance Offices, and Quack Doctors.  He is not sure that dying swans have not sung a mournful hymn over their last moments, under an affecting and human sense of their mortality.  He has believed in the English lark to the same point of pleasing credulity.  Why should he not give its existence the same faith?  The history of its life is as old as the English alphabet, and older still.  It sang over the dark and hideous lairs of the bloody Druids centuries before Julius Cæsar was born, and they doubtless had a pleasant name for it, unless true music was hateful to their ears.  It sang, without loss or change of a single note of this morning’s song, to the Roman legions as they marched, or made roads in Britain.  It rang the same voluntaries to the Saxons, Danes, and Normans, through the long ages, and, perhaps, tended to soften their antagonisms, and hasten their blending into one great and mighty people.  How the name and song of this happiest of earthly birds run through all the rhyme and romance of English poetry, of English rural life, ever since there was an England!  Take away its history and its song from her daisy-eyed meadows, and shaded lanes, and hedges breathing and blooming with sweetbrier leaves and hawthorn flowers—from her thatched cottages, veiled with ivy—from the morning tread of the reapers, and the mower’s lunch of bread and cheese under the meadow elm, and you take away a living and beautiful spirit more charming than music.  You take away from English poetry one of its pleiades, and bereave it of a companionship more intimate than that of the nearest neighborhood of the stars above.  How the lark’s life and song blend, in the rhyme of the poet, with “the sheen of silver fountains leaping to the sea,” with morning sunbeams and noontide thoughts, with the sweetest breathing flowers, and softest breezes, and busiest bees, and greenest leaves, and happiest human industries, loves, hopes, and aspirations!

The American has read and heard of all this from his youth up to the day of setting his foot, for the first time, on English ground.  He has tried to believe it, as in things seen, temporal and tangible.  But in doing this he has to contend with a sense or suspicion of unreality—a feeling that there has been great poetical exaggeration in the matter.  A patent fact lies at the bottom of this incredulity.  The forefathers of New England carried no wild bird with them to sing about their cabin homes in the New World.  But they found beautiful and happy birds on that wild continent, as well-dressed, as graceful in form and motion, and of as fine taste for music and other accomplishments, as if they and their ancestors had sung before the courts of Europe for twenty generations.  These sang their sweet songs of welcome to the Pilgrims as they landed from the “Mayflower.”  These sang to them cheerily, through the first years and the later years of their stern trials and tribulations.  These built their nests where the blue eyes of the first white children born in the land could peer in upon the speckled eggs with wonder and delight.  What wonder that those strong-hearted puritan fathers and mothers, who

     “Made the aisles of the dim wood ring
      With the anthems of the free,”

should love the fellowship of these native singers of the field and forest, and give them names their hearts loved in the old home land beyond the sea!  They did not consult Linnæus, nor any musty Latin genealogy of Old World birds, at the christening of these songsters.  There was a good family resemblance in many cases.  The blustering partridge, brooding over her young in the thicket, was very nearly like the same bird in England.  For the mellow-throated thrush of the old land they found a mate in the new, of the same size, color, and general habits, though less musical.  The blackbird was nearly the same in many respects, though the smaller American wore a pair of red epaulettes.  The swallows had their coat tails cut after the same old English pattern, and built their nests after the same model, and twittered under the eaves with the same ecstacy, and played the same antics in the air.  But the two dearest home-birds of the fatherland had no family relations nor counterparts in America; and the pilgrim fathers and their children could not make their humble homes happy without the lark and the robin, at least in name and association; so they looked about them for substitutes.  There was a plump, full-chested bird, in a chocolate-colored vest, with a bluish dress coat, that would mount the highest tree-top in early spring, and play his flute by the hour for very joy to see the snow melt and the buds swell again.  There was such a rollicking happiness in his loud, clear notes, and he apparently sang them in such sympathy with human fellowships, and hopes, and homes, and he was such a cheery and confiding denizen of the orchard and garden withal, that he became at once the pet bird of old and young, and was called the robin; and well would it be if its English namesake possessed its sterling virtues; for, with all its pleasant traits and world-wide reputation, the English robin is a pretentious, arrogant busybody, characteristically pugilistic and troublesome in the winged society of England.  In form, dress, deportment, disposition, and in voice and taste for vocal music, the American robin surpasses the English most decidedly.  In this our grave forefathers did more than justice to the home-bird they missed on Plymouth Rock.  In this generous treatment of their affection for it, they perhaps condoned for mating the English lark so incongruously; but it was true their choice was very limited.  To match the prima donna carissima of English field and sky, it was necessary to select a meadow bird, with some other features of resemblance.  It would never do to give the cherished name and association to one that lived in the forest, or built its nest in the tree-tops or house-tops, or to one that was black, yellow, or red.  Having to conciliate all these conditions, and do the best with the material at hand, they pitched upon a rather large, brownish bird, in a drab waistcoat, slightly mottled, and with a loud, cracked voice, which nobody ever liked.  So it never became a favorite, even to those who first gave it the name of lark.  It was not its only defect that it lacked an ear and voice for music.  There is always a scolding accent that marks its conversation with other birds in the brightest mornings of June.  He is very noisy, but never merry nor musical.  Indeed, compared with the notes of the English lark, his are like the vehement ejaculations of a maternal duck in distress.

Take it in all, no bird in either hemisphere equals the English lark in heart or voice, for both unite to make it the sweetest, happiest, the welcomest singer that was ever winged, like the high angels of God’s love.  It is the living ecstacy of joy when it mounts up into its “glorious privacy of light.”  On the earth it is timid, silent, and bashful, as if not at home, and not sure of its right to be there at all.  It is rather homely withal, having nothing in feather, feature, or form, to attract notice.  It is seemingly made to be heard, not seen, reversing the old axiom addressed to children when getting voicy.  Its mission is music, and it floods a thousand acres of the blue sky with it several times a day.  Out of that palpitating speck of living joy there wells forth a sea of twittering ecstacy upon the morning and evening air.  It does not ascend by gyrations, like the eagle or birds of prey.  It mounts up like a human aspiration.  It seems to spread out its wings and to be lifted straight upwards out of sight by the afflatus of its own happy heart.  To pour out this in undulating rivulets of rhapsody is apparently the only motive of its ascension.  This it is that has made it so loved of all generations.  It is the singing angel of man’s nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music.  Its sweet warbling is only the metrical palpitation of its life of joy.  It goes up over the roof-trees of the rural hamlet on the wings of its song, as if to train the rural soul to trial flights heavenward.  Never did the Creator put a voice of such volume into so small a living thing.  It is a marvel—almost a miracle.  In a still hour you can hear it at nearly a mile’s distance.  When its form is lost in the hazy lace-work of the sun’s rays above, it pours down upon you all the thrilling semitones of its song as distinctly as if it were warbling to you in your window.

The only American bird that could star it with the English lark, and win any admiration at a popular concert by its side, is our favourite comic singer, the Bobolink.  I have thought often, when listening to British birds at their morning rehearsals, what a sensation would ensue if Master Bob, in his odd-fashioned bib and tucker, should swagger into their midst, singing one of those Low-Dutch voluntaries which he loves to pour down into the ears of our mowers in haying time.  Not only would such an apparition and overture throw the best-trained orchestra of Old World birds into amazement or confusion, but astonish all the human listeners at an English concert.  With what a wonderment would one of these blooming, country milkmaids look at the droll harlequin, and listen to those familiar words of his, set to his own music:-

      Go to milk! go to milk!
      Oh, Miss Phillisey,
      Dear Miss Phillisey,
      What will Willie say
      If you don’t go to milk!
      No cheese, no cheese,
      No butter nor cheese
      If you don’t go to milk.

It is a wonder that in these days of refined civilization, when Jenny Lind, Grisi, Patti, and other celebrated European singers, some of them from very warm climates, are transported to America to delight our Upper-Tendom, that there should be no persistent and successful effort to introduce the English lark into our out-door orchestra of singing-birds.  No European voice would be more welcome to the American million.  It would be a great gain to the nation, and be helpful to our religious devotions, as well as to our secular satisfactions.  In several of our Sabbath hymns there is poetical reference to the lark and its song.  For instance, that favorite psalm of gratitude for returning Spring opens with these lines:—

     “The winter is over and gone,
      The thrush whistles sweet on the spray,
      The turtle breathes forth her soft moan,
        The lark mounts on high and warbles away.”

Now, not one American man, woman, or child in a thousand ever heard or saw an English lark, and how is he, she, or it to sing the last line of the foregoing verse with the spirit and understanding due to an exercise of devotion?  The American lark never mounts higher than the top of a meadow elm, on which it see-saws, and screams, or quacks, till it is tired; then draws a bee-line for another tree, or a fence-post, never even undulating on the voyage.  It may be said, truly enough, that the hymn was written in England.  Still, if sung in America from generation to generation, we ought to have the English lark with us, for our children to see and hear, lest they may be tempted to believe that other and more serious similes in our Sabbath hymns are founded on fancy instead of fact.

Nor would it be straining the point, nor be dealing in poetical fancies, if we should predicate upon the introduction of the English lark into American society a supplementary influence much needed to unify and nationalise the heterogeneous elements of our population.  Men, women, and children, speaking all the languages and representing all the countries and races of Europe, are streaming in upon us weekly in widening currents.  The rapidity with which they become assimilated to the native population is remarkable.  But there is one element from abroad that does not Americanise itself so easily—and that, curiously, is one the most American that comes from Europe—in other words, the English.  They find with us everything as English as it can possibly be out of England—their language, their laws, their literature, their very bibles, psalm-books, psalm-tunes, the same faith and forms of worship, the same common histories, memories, affinities, affections, and general structure of social life and public institutions; yet they are generally the very last to be and feel at home in America.  A Norwegian mountaineer, in his deerskin doublet, and with a dozen English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie than an intelligent, middle-class Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts.  Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it harmoniously with the best vitalities of the nation.  And this consummation would well repay a special and extraordinary effect.  Perhaps this expedient would be the most successful of all that remain untried.  A single incident will prove that it is more than a mere theory.  Here it is, in substance:—

Some years ago, when the Australian gold fever was hot in the veins of thousands, and fleets of ships were conveying them to that far-off, uncultivated world, a poor old woman landed with the great multitude of rough and reckless men, who were fired to almost frenzy by dreams of ponderous nuggets and golden fortunes.  For these they left behind them all the enjoyments, endearments, all the softening sanctities and surroundings of home and social life in England.  For these they left mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.  There they were, thinly tented in the rain, and the dew, and the mist, a busy, boisterous, womanless camp of diggers and grubbers, roughing-and-tumbling it in the scramble for gold mites, with no quiet Sabbath breaks, nor Sabbath songs, nor Sabbath bells to measure off and sweeten a season of rest.  Well, the poor widow, who had her cabin within a few miles of “the diggings,” brought with her but few comforts from the old homeland—a few simple articles of furniture, the bible and psalm-book of her youth, and an English lark to sing to her solitude the songs that had cheered her on the other side of the globe.  And the little thing did it with all the fervor of its first notes in the English sky.  In her cottage window it sang to her hour by hour at her labor, with a voice never heard before on that wild continent.  The strange birds of the land came circling around in their gorgeous plumage to hear it.  Even four-footed animals, of grim countenance, paused to hear it.  Then, one by one, came other listeners.  They came reverently, and their voices softened into silence as they listened.  Hard-visaged men, bare-breasted and unshaven, came and stood gentle as girls; and tears came out upon many a tanned and sun-blistered cheek as the little bird warbled forth the silvery treble of its song about the green hedges, the meadow streams, the cottage homes, and all the sunny memories of the fatherland.  And they came near unto the lone widow with pebbles of gold in their hard and horny hands, and asked her to sell them the bird, that it might sing to them while they were bending to the pick and the spade.  She was poor, and the gold was heavy; yet she could not sell the warbling joy of her life.  But she told them that they might come whenever they would to hear it sing.  So, on Sabbath days, having no other preacher nor teacher, nor sanctuary privilege, they came down in large companies from their gold-pits, and listened to the devotional hymns of the lark, and became better and happier men for its music.

Seriously, it may be urged that the refined tastes, arts, and genius of the present day do not develop themselves symmetrically or simultaneously in this matter.  Here are connoisseurs and enthusiasts in vegetable nature hunting up and down all the earth’s continents for rare trees, plants, shrubs, and flowers.  They are bringing them to England and America in shiploads, to such extent and variety, that nearly all the dead languages and many of the living are ransacked to furnish names for them.  Llamas, dromedaries, Cashmere goats, and other strange animals, are brought, thousands of miles by sea and land, to be acclimatised and domesticated to these northern countries.  Artificial lakes are made for the cultivation of fish caught in Antipodean streams.  That is all pleasant and hopeful and proper.  The more of that sort of thing the better.  But why not do the other thing, too?  Vattemare made it the mission of his life to induce people of different countries to exchange books, or unneeded duplicates of literature.  We need an Audubon or Wilson, not to make new collections of feathered skeletons, and new volumes on ornithology, but to effect an exchange of living birds between Europe and America; not for caging, not for Zoological gardens and museums, but for singing their free songs in our fields and forests.  There is no doubt that the English lark would thrive and sing as well in America as in this country.  And our bobolink would be as easily acclimatised in Europe.  Who could estimate the pleasure which such an exchange in the bird-world would give to millions on both sides of the Atlantic?

There are some English birds which we could not introduce into the feathered society of America, any more than we could import a score of British Dukes and Duchesses, with all their hereditary dignities and grand surroundings, into the very heart and centre of our democracy.  For instance, the grave and aristocratic rooks, if transported to our country, would turn up their noses and caw with contempt at our institutions—even at our oldest buildings and most solemn and dignified oaks.  It is very doubtful if they would be conciliated into any respect for the Capitol or The White House at Washington.  They have an intuitive and most discriminating perception of antiquity, and their adhesion to it is invincible.  Whether they came in with the Normans, or before, history does not say.  One thing would seem evident.  They are older than the Order of the Garter, and belonged to feudalism.  They are the living spirits of feudalism, which have survived its human retainers by several hundred years, and now represent the defunct institution as pretentiously as in King Stephen’s day.  They are as fond of old Norman castles, cathedrals, and churches, as the very ivy itself, and cling to them with as much pertinacity.  For several hundred generations of bird-life, they and their ancestors have colonised their sable communities in the baronial park-trees of England, and their descendants promise to abide for as many generations to come.  In size, form, and color they differ but little from the American crow, but are swifter on the wing, with greater “gift of the gab,” and less dignified in general deportment, though more given to aristocratic airs.  Although they emigrated from France long before “La Democratic Sociale” was ever heard of in that country, they may be considered the founders of the Socialistic theory and practice; and to this day they live and move in phalansteries, which succeed far better than those attempted by the American “Fourierites” some years ago.  As in human communities, the collision of mind with mind contributes fortuitous scintillations of intelligence to their general enlightenment; so gregarious animals, birds and bees seem to acquire especial quick-wittedness from similar intercourse.  The English rook, therefore, is more astute, subtle, and cunning than our American crow, and some of his feats of legerdemain are quite vulpine.

The jackdaw is to the rook what the Esquimaux is to the Algonquin Indian; of the same form, color, and general habits, but smaller in size.  They are as fond of ancient abbeys and churches as ever were the monks of old.  Indeed, they have many monkish habits and predilections, and chatter over their Latin rituals in the storied towers of old Norman cathedrals, and in the belfries of ivy-webbed churches in as vivicacious confusion.

There is no country in the world of the same size that has so many birds in it as England; and there are none so musical and merry.  They all sing here congregationalwise, just as the people do in the churches and chapels of all religious denominations.  As these buildings were fashioned in early times after the Gothic order of elm and oak-tree architecture, so the human worshippers therein imitated the birds, as well as the branches, of those trees, and learned to sing their Sabbath hymns together, young and old, rich and poor, in the same general uprising and blending of multitudinous voices.  I believe everything sings that has wings in England.  And well it might, for here it is safe from shot, stones, snares, and other destructives.  “Young England” is not allowed to sport with firearms, after the fashion of our American boys.  You hear no juvenile popping at the small birds of the meadow, thicket, or hedge-row, in Spring, Summer, or Autumn.  After travelling and sojourning nearly ten years in the country, I have never seen a boy throw a stone at a sparrow, or climb a tree for a bird’s-nest.  The only birds that are not expected to die a natural death are the pheasant, partridge, grouse, and woodcock; and these are to be killed according to the strictest laws and customs, at a certain season of the year, and then only by titled or wealthy men who hold their vested interest in the sport among the most rigid and sacred rights of property.  Thus law, custom, public sentiment, climate, soil, and production, all combine to give bird-life a development in England that it attains in no other country.  In no other land is it so multitudinous and musical; in none is there such ample and varied provision for housing and homing it.  Every field is a great bird’s-nest.  The thick, green hedge that surrounds it, and the hedge-trees arising at one or two rods’ interval, afford nesting and refuge for myriads of these meadow singers.  The groves and thickets are full of them and their music; so full, indeed, that sometimes every leaf seems to pulsate with a little piping voice in the general concert.  Nor are they confined to the fields, groves, and hedges of the quiet country.  If the census of the sparrows alone in London could be taken, they would count up to a larger figure than all the birds of a New England county would reach.  Then there is another interesting feature of this companionship.  A great deal of it lasts through the entire year.  There are ten times as many birds in England as in America in the winter.  Here the fields are green through the coldest months.  No deep and drifting snows cover a frozen earth for ten or twelve weeks, as with us.  There is plenty of shelter and seeds for birds that can stand an occasional frost or wintry storm, and a great number of them remain the whole year around the English homesteads.

If such a difference were a full compensation, our North American birds make up in dress what they fall short of English birds in voice and musical talent.  The robin redbreast and the goldfinch come out in brighter colors than any other beaux and belles of the season here; but the latter is only a slender-waisted brunette, and the former a plump, strutting, little coxcomb, in a mahogany-colored waistcoat.  There is nothing here approaching in vivid colors the New England yellow-bird, hang-bird, red-bird, indigo-bird, or even the bluebird.  In this, as well as other differences, Nature adjusts the system of compensation which is designed to equalise the conditions of different countries.