twenty were arable, occupied by Mr. O. J. Rowles. As might be expected from this large extent of pasture, Mr. Rowles relied chiefly upon his cows, of which he kept from fifty to sixty. Five men and boys only were employed upon the place, the labour-bill coming to about £4 a week, a very light total. The carter received 11s. a week and a cottage, and good, steady day men 13s. a week. In Bristol they could earn from 18s. to £1, so it is not strange that many of them migrated thither, although probably there the money does not go so far as the smaller country wage. In walking over the farm we came to a field with a northern aspect-back sunded' is the local term, from the fact of its not facing to the sun-from which we had a beautiful view of the surrounding country, including the pinnacled and spired tower of Trent Church, and the river Yeo winding through the pastures, a silver line that marks off Somerset from Dorsetshire. The first piece of arable we saw was six and a half acres, very clean and well cultivated, under spring beans and white oats. Next came thirteen and a half acres of black oats and trifolium, the latter of which crops was to be succeeded by mangold in the following season. Of mangolds Mr. Rowles makes a speciality; indeed, in competition with all England for six years he took prizes given, I think, by Messrs. Proctor, of Bristol. His system was, first cabbages or some other green crop fed off with sheep; then thirty loads of farm manure ploughed in per acre; then 5 cwt. of superphosphate broadcast and harrowed in after the mangolds were drilled, with a result of fifty tons of splendid roots per acre. After the mangolds two white crops were taken in succession. Of hay Mr. Rowles grew a hundred acres, producing in the season of 1900, 30 cwt. to the acre. In the case of this crop he saved labour by dragging up the grass with a hay collector and making the rick in the middle of the field, thus avoiding all loading and unloading of waggons. His milk fetched 5d. a gallon at the co-operative milk factory in or near Yeovil. Another farm that I went over was that of Mr. G. Dampney, of Chilton Farm, near Ilchester, a holding of 500 acres, of which fifty acres, or 10 per cent., were arable. Here ten men were employed, the labour-bill coming to £1 an acre. The rent was 38s. the acre. Mr. Dampney, being a gentleman of great enterprise, ran his farm in conjunction with a butcher's shop in Yeovil, which was, I understood, doing very well, so well indeed that he could not keep pace with the demand. The expenses of the shop, at which butter, eggs, and poultry were also sold, were, however, considerable, as in addition to rent and rates, &c., some of the labour must be highly paid. Only ten acres of wheat were grown upon this farm, of which the straw was used for thatching. The rest of the necessary straw Mr. Dampney bought. He kept more than 200 horned animals and about 1,000 sheep. The cultivation was high, the corn, cake, and artificial manure bills amounting to £1,100 a year. The average return of mangolds was from forty to fifty tons, and, as in the case of Mr. Rowles, here it is the fashion to follow them with two white crops. Mr. Dampney manured too high to grow barley satisfactorily, this being a cereal that when over-stimulated is apt to go down.' He considered oats, of which he grew about twenty acres, his best corn crop. Of trifolium he had ten or twelve acres, to be followed, first by kail and then by mangold. The trifolium with coarse grasses, &c., was manufactured into ensilage, his silo capacity being of no less than 500 tons. This ensilage, he said, would keep two years. In addition to other food his bullocks were fed twice a day with a ration of 12 lbs. of a mixture compounded of ground barley, oats and maize, chaff and pulped root, a small quantity of wheat meal being added. On this they did very well. He kept also ten or twelve sows of the Tamworth and Berkshire breeds. If I remember right this farm had the advantage of excellent water power conveyed to the buildings from a neighbouring stream by means of an underground channel. On another day I visited the holding of Mr. Henry Dampney, The Manor Farm, Closworth, which is four and a half miles south of Yeovil and on the Dorchester road. On our way out I noted a very curious and lofty obelisk built of roughly-wrought stone and standing in a belt of Scotch firs. The local story about this monument is that with others it was erected to mark the boundaries of his property by some charitable landowner who desired to find employment for working men when labour only cost a penny a day.' At what period this philanthropist flourished I cannot tell, but from the general aspect of the obelisk I imagine that it is not older than the eighteenth century. Mr. Henry Dampney farmed 640 acres under Lord Portman at a rent of 13s. the acre, which is some 2s. or 3s. lower than that which is generally paid in this district. Here the soil was of a very different character from what we saw on the farms that I have described, being for the most part clay (although in places sandy) with a subsoil of brickearth and stone, which bakes and cracks badly in dry weather. Of the total acreage of the farm 200 were arable, 100 acres having been laid down to grass by Mr. Dampney and his father who was here before him. He kept no fewer than sixty cows, Somerset-Devons and cross-breds. The latter he declared to be the cow we like.' These animals will give an average of from twelve to fourteen pints of rich milk while in profit. Also they have the great advantage of fattening rapidly and well when they are no longer of use for the dairy. Thus a twelve-year-old cow, after being fed for a month on Bibby's Cake, would often fetch as much as £20 from the butcher. Indeed Mr. Dampney instanced a case in which one cow of fifteen years sold for £23 when fat. On this farm there existed a curious custom, somewhat similar to that which I have described in Wiltshire, of leasing out the cows to a dairyman. I understood the arrangement, which must have proved satisfactory to all parties, as it had endured for twenty years, to be as follows: The cows, which are calved down in spring, and not promiscuously throughout the year, as when studying the agriculture of that country, I found to be the custom in Holland, were let to the dairyman at an annual rent of £10 each, the resulting butter, milk, and cheese being his property. Mr. Dampney fed the animals, but Mr. Clarke, the dairyman, paid half the cake bill. Also if for any reason it was not good enough, the dairyman had the right to cast a cow within two or three weeks of its being entered as one of his stock, but not later, the subsequent risk being his. The calves also belonged to him, and with the exception of the hay which was supplied, were fed at his expense on beans and milk, but Mr. Dampney bought them back from him on May 18 at an average price of 75s. a piece. Another arrangement seemed to be that, although each party paid half the cake bill for the cows, in a dry summer Mr. Dampney found it all. Each cow was reckoned to consume three acres of grass, supplemented by hay in the spring of the year. In addition to his cows Mr. Dampney kept a flock of 250 fine ewes of a race that his family had bred for a hundred years. They were very good-looking creatures, with a close, firm fleece. The practice seemed to be to drop the lambs in March and to shear them in June. They are sold about the end of August, and make from 38s. to 40s. Mr. Dampney's custom was to feed the ewes with linseed cake for two months before they lambed, as until he did this, for years he lost about 10 per cent. of the lambs. Now he loses no lambs, and in 1901 only nine ewes had died from chill contracted about a fortnight after lambing. Here a male of one year is called a wether, and a female of one year a hog. A teg is a lamb that has been shorn. The value of the tegs was from 45s. to 48s. On this farm 120 acres were mown for hay, but owing to the variable quality of the soil the return is very uneven. Thus some fields will yield a ton an acre, and others but 5 cwt.; the average may perhaps be put at 15 cwt. It was the custom here to feed off the swedes as they stand. After the sheep have done with them the stump and root are jobbed out with an iron instrument and cleared away, as on this heavy land, if pulled before they are fed, they are apt to be trampled and spoilt. I made trial of this jobbing-out process, and found that to do it quickly and well requires a good deal of skill. When drilling artificial for roots, of which Mr. Dampney gave 4 cwt. of dissolved bones and superphosphate to the acre, it was his habit to mix the ash from burnt ant-hills with the manure in the proportion of half to half. He said that when thus prepared it went through the drill much better and was otherwise more beneficial. The average produce of his corn land was four quarters of wheat and five quarters of oats, but the barley that this soil produces is of poor quality. Adjoining the house stood the Church of All Saints, which I visited. It is Perpendicular in style, and in many ways very interesting. In the churchyard stands an ancient preaching cross and the tomb of the famous bellfounder Thomas Purdue, who died in 1711. On its east end is engraved the representation of a bell and this quaint epitaph: HERE LIES THE BELL FOUNDER HONEST & TRUE The population of the parish of Closworth is about a hundred; since the last census it has lost twenty inhabitants. From Closworth we drove to Haselbury to visit Mr. G. D. Templeman, of The Manor Farm. On our way we passed through four villages, in none of which was there to be found a public-house, or so I was informed. This, I may remark, is perhaps the greatest curiosity that I met with in my extensive wanderings throughout the length and breadth of England. When I questioned them about it, however, some |