constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but
a free and bountiful largess. Then the stubble must be broken up by the
plough, and again there is a fresh helping for them. Brown partridge, and
black rook, and yellowhammer, all hues and degrees, come to the
wheat-field.


II.

Every day something new is introduced into farming, and yet the old
things are not driven out. Every one knows that steam is now used on the
farm for ploughing and threshing and working machinery at the farmstead,
and one would have thought that by this time it would have superseded all
other motive powers. Yet this very day I counted twenty great cart-horses
at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to
harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were
dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above
the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost
prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon
up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same
farm--it was Sunday--a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in
a corner of the yard looked round to see who it was going by, and the sun
shone on the glossy hair, smooth as if it had been brushed, the long
black mane hung over the arching neck, the large dark eyes looked at us
so quietly--a real English picture. The black funnel of the steam-engine
has not driven the beautiful cart-horses out of the fields. They have
been there for centuries, and there they stay; the notched, broad wheel
of the steam-plough has but just begun to leave its trail on the earth.
New things come, but the old do not go away. One life is but a summer's
day compared with the long cycle of years of agriculture, and yet it