bead

himself down, and in three minutes snored like a pig. Laugh at it-laugh at it, and so laugh at yourself. He sleeps that is more than you will, your head will never lie easy on your pillow again; when night closes upon your crops for growth or for blight, or if ripe for depredators, you will dream of thieves and foxes prowling about your poultry-yard. I went last week to see poor old farmer S-: you know something went wrong with him, and there he is in a lunatic asylum. He told me he could not sleep a wink at nights, for his sheep patting about his room all night. What misery, to be ruined by them when in his senses, and to be haunted by them when they had driven him out of his senses!! I thought of you.

Is it too late to be "a word to the wise?" When your labourer rests from his work, your work will be going on. You may, indeed, quote your favourite Gray

"The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

You may well call it darkness, for you will have it black enough-all will be black, even your corn, for that will be sooted. And when all your projects fail, and you are really ruined-for I see no other end if you pursue this follywhat bantering, jeering, and insult there will be at the sale of your stock, and what bitter sacrifice! You had better sell off all now, while you can with a good grace; but " quem deus vult per dere, prius dementat." You ought to have been made wise, for it was in your presence I heard our excellent old friend George Cartoon go through his experiences of farming. Do not you remember how we were sitting one summer evening in his little snuggery, with all his drawings about him, and his portfolios of prints, his collection of Bonasonis and Mark-Antonios? and we looked out upon his little garden, which he had Italianized, and there were his vases, his antiques, his terra cottas; and between his rows of shelves of " choice Italian," his beautiful drawing of the Lake of Nemi, the green transparent "speculum Dianæ," and there was he, in the evening of life, the sun gilding a countenance beaming with benevolence, intelligence,

and fancy unextinguishable. His own head was the best of his bronzes. You thought his description exquisite-it was so did it make no more permanent impression than that transitory admiration? Somehow or other the conversation fell upon the badness of the times. He described how, at the commencement of the war, he returned from his charming Italy; the funds had fallen immensely, and he found himself thereby minus half his property; at the same time, every thing else was rising. How he settled himself in a small neat villa near town, and still went on with his tasteful pursuits-the arts, literature, and benevolent schemes. Some of them, it must be confessed, whimsical enough, to do every body all the good in the world. Still he found that, if his means were decreased, his family was increasing; and so, in an evil moment, he thought of selling out his stock, and buying a farm. And how was he led to this? He found his neighbours first putting down one horse, then another, professing walking was much better for their health than a servant, adding, with a forced smile, how pleasant it was to be inde. pendent of such plagues. Then, rising one morning very early, he found his neighbour, who had hitherto been an indolent and luxurious man, up before him, and at work in his garden, professing, as his reason, that his physician had ordered the exercise for him; and so it went on, with a thousand little mean subterfuges, that every body was doing every thing he could for himself, and reducing expenditure as much as possible. Now, our excellent old friend, Cartoon, hated subterfuges and excuses, had always spoken his mind and told the truth, and would still do so. So he told all his neigh. bours why they did what they did, and thenceforth determined manfully to do his best; and so it was he bought

a farm.

He had at first thought of going to America, and so being a settler in the back settlements a friend had gone there, and sent him a true account of things; and such an account! The settler had scarcely arrived was, in fact, putting up a few drawings, and his daughters were arranging their trifling ornaments around the room, and trying the keys of their pianowhen in broke two monsters, who called themselves visiters, come to introduce themselves to the new settler. One poked his stick through the glass of a drawing, the other threw a glass holding flowers out of the window, both saying, "We don't want such things here; if you live here, you must live as we do;" and then banging his stick down on the piano, enough to split it, "What," quoth one, "d'ye bring this thing here for; and I 'spose your daughters squall to it, hey?" and then he set up such a laugh. The new settler declared it was not human -"nec vox hominem sonat," - and must have been acquired in the forests. Well, this new settler was soon sick of it; but, before he broke up, wrote to dissuade Cartoon from being a settler. So, to go back from this parenthesis, he bought a farm; and where do you think? Our worthy friend knew nothing of land but by sketching it, and his studies had been among mountains-he liked the wildness and beauty of them; and so, rather inconsiderately, he made his purchase among the stoney hills of In truth, his land was none of the best, and it would have broken the spirit of an iron farmer to have broken it in. It was about as stubborn a piece of goods, as had ever fallen to the lot of man to have to subdue. All this he did not know when he bought it. Experience is the thing, and happy is he who can get out of such experience as poor Cartoon did. But his descrip. tion was not of his getting out of it, but into it. First, being, totius in illis, by nature an enthusiast in whatever he takes up, he read nothing but agricultural works; thought he must do the thing in earnest-had an auction of his curiosities of taste-his expensive library-nay, went so far as, finding some not fetch the price they should, he gave them away. But his real friends would not acccept them, but deposited them for him, knowing well that their friend would come back to his taste, or his taste to him; and so it turned out; and many a day have you and I admired that happy remnant of books, portfolios, and pictures; and surrounded with which I drew his picture when he detailed to us his farming experiences. You remember the taking possession-how he settled first his family at the town of and arrived at his farm one morning before breakfast, where his land-bailiff,

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Then in

or manager, met him. Then came a volley of disasters; the neighbours' cattle had broken into his pasture; the poor had destroyed his hedges for firewood. Half his sheep were going fast with the rot. "Well," thought he, as he push'd the man out of the room, "I will have my breakfast first," and so down he sat; and scarcely had he tasted the first morsel, when the man came in again to tell him that his cattle had broken into a neighbour's field, who had sent word to say he had put them in the pound, and would measter be pleased to go and get them out. "Hang 'em all," said Cartoon, "let me have my breakfast;" and away went the man. rushed Jenny Lake, the dairymaid, in a rage, that Sally Goodman's big boy had throw'd a stick at the gander, and killed him. Her he pushed our of the room, and this time locked the door. It wasn't long before it was invaded again, but he was deaf to all entreaty to open it; repeating just -"Can't come in, can't come in." Breakfast over, out he went, fairly intending to buckle himself to his task of calamities, and know them all. The list was long, and bad enough; and he never found himself, he said, with all his imagined knowledge and power of invention, so completely at a loss. However, having in some sort settled the most urgent, and left others to settle themselves, he thought he had done enough for the first day; and he determined to indulge himself, and be free from all further interruptions. So being, as you know, a lover of the picturesque, he wandered among the rocks, and seeing a snug place under a broad shadow-"Here," thought he, "not a soul will ever find me out;" and here, down he sat, took out his little book and apparatus to sketch, thinking he would have the beauty, if not the profit of the country. Scarcely had he spread his paper before him, when a farmer, riding along the road some distance below him, (and nothing less than the sharp eyes of Malevolence, he vowed, could ever have found him out,) spied him, and thus called out to him: " Holloa, measter; the craws be picking out the eyes of your lambs." " What," cried Cartoon, "do they do these things here too?" and so he gave up his sketching for that day. Nor did he close his first day without so many disasters unlook

ed for, unspeculated upon, that when he laid his head on his pillow, he thought it stuffed with the thorns of his land; and when he did sleep, dreamed he was gored by his neighbour's bull, which he always considered a prophetic dream, for, a few weeks after, he had but a narrow escape from the ferocious creature of a more ferocious master. Thus ended his first day and night.

However, he was in for it, and could not well get out of it; and for several months endured torments agricultural, beyond what his imagination, a fertile one, could have drawn. He couldn't sell his sheep, he said; and one day asked a farmer, who seemed most friendly to him, the reason. "Why," quoth he, " you should put big buttons on your coat, and drive 'em to the fair, as we do, and be there, d'ye see, yourself." "Well," said Cartoon, "since I had come to infra dig, I thought for once, buttons shouldn't stand in my way, and for'once I would not have a soul above buttons; so I got the pattern of the farmer's, and big buttons had I to my coat." And so to fair he went. One came and pinched his sheep, and went away; another did the same, but nobody bought, ask what price he would; and by degrees all went away, and he found himself left in the fair with his detestable sheep. Nobody would buy them; and most grinned and walked off when they had felt them. Then the greatest annoyance he had in doing as the farmers did, was in returning from fairs-stopping with them at inns; and, in those fine days, they drank their bottles of wine, as well as spirits. Now, Cartoon de tested drinking, and nearly killed himself in the attempt to do as "we farmers" do. On one occasion, he asked the same farmer again, when the wine was in him, why he could not sell his sheep. "Because, to tell you the truth, they don't like gemmen, and won't buy of a gemman." " Then," thought Cartoon to himself, "I'll give up; and so he did; and sold his farm, luckily, at no great loss. He laughed very heartily, and said he had one trifling, and he hoped innocent, revenge upon his agriculturist neighbours. On the road, one day, he met some caravans going to the fair at B, and fell into conversation with a gentleman riding the same road. He turned out to be the celebrated ventriloquist of the west of England.

This man he engaged to ride after a trio of farmers at a little distance. He did so; and when they came to the cross road, he pretended to turn his horse's head another way, and threw his voice into the beast's mouth"Don't pull me so, for I'd rather go along with these farmers." Off set the farmers as fast as they could gallop, verily thinking a greater thief in grain than themselves was after them.

maimed

Dear, worthy, now, alas! too aged Cartoon, the world, with all its ingratitude, by which word "world" is always meant ten miles round, will be sad when all your days are numbered. Nothing can quench the glorious fire of your animation, while life lasts. Fortune has run full butt against you, and retreated " manca, by your wit and cutting smile. No darkness, without nor within, can dim the illumination your rapid words throw upon all subjects. Το know you still live, and are happy, is a recompense for some of the wrongs the world have done me; and when you die, if pure Christian benevolence ever ascended to happier mansions than of this world, there will be such provided for you, and who knows if you may not there again count over your Bonasonis? Terrestrial thoughts and images crowd upon terrestrial vision, and, till the mists be removed from before it, your cheerful and benignant face, in your snuggery of art and of books, will be ever to me a picture of present happiness, and of hope and promise of its continuance for ever.

Is this stepping out of philosophy? Now, my friend, be wise from his example, and turn once more to be a sensible man. Resist, if it be not too late, the temptation. "Take the bull by the horns"-no, that is an evil omen, have nothing to do with bulls, nor cows. You have already been vaccinated and caught the infection-the love of cattle. You are like St Antony, tempted by all unclean beasts. Soon your taste will degenerate into the porcine; they were devils that entered into swine, take care the swine do not enter into you. Then your very similes, and all your ideas, will be hoggish-you will consider the summum bonum to be a good bacon pig. "A-talking of sows," drawled out a farmer to another, "how's your wife?" Was any thing ever more thoroughly porcine? Such fellows are blind to every other beauty, they go about with a sty, in their eye. You will prefer offal to romance. A vile butcher will be your real Orlando, and Angelicas you will see no more: nay, the soft touch of woman's hand will furnish you with no other idea but that it would make good butter. Abel the student was rusticated "to sow

his wild oats," fell in love with the

butter-woman, and made horned cattle his friends, and became as one of them. There is no end to examples all around and about you, to deter you -but I fear you are infatuated. The ignis fatuus of agriculture is leading you a dance into a quagmire. Had you been weary of your letter'd ease, and wished more active employment, consistent with your profession, you might have worked your fingers to the bone with great eclat for bazarsyou might have done any folly of that kind, and been praised and thought the worthier-you might have made reverend baby clothes-you might have

cobbled from morning to night, and made infant shoes to defray expenses of building a church-any thing better than putting your own shoes down in the mire and clay at the tail of your plough. I suppose you have been reading The Farmers' Boy, or some such stuff - Bloomfield, by-the-by, was a cobbler, and left his trade for poetry, and wrote his agricultural praises, and one of his own lines expresses to a nicety the change,

"And dirt usurps the empire of his shoes." He had better cobbled on; he might have risen to be Emperor of Morocco, Had he stuck to his trade, his trade would have stuck by him and so I fear did his poetry, for it stuck, though it had Loftus's lift. If the cacoethes scribendi comes upon you, you will write in the Farmers' Magazine, and such works, and get into controversies upon the breeding of pigs and planting of cabbages-a worthy object indeed for all your learning and your acquire

ments. You will waste your genius in inventing rat-traps, and when asked what is your study, will answer with Edgar in Lear,

"To prevent the foul fiend, and kill vermin."

You will write against blockheads, and make no impression. I remember well when I was a boy at school,

a shrewd little fellow that had lived in town all his little life till he came to school, laying a wager he would write in a Farmer's Magazine and be answered. We thought it impossible,

as he knew nothing more of the matter, excuse me if I say, than you do. He wrote on the drilling of turnipsdescribing, with great ambiguity of expression and circumlocution, a new method, which, if it could be at all understood, was the mere momentary vagary of his brain. Away went his paper-it was inserted-more, it was answered more, it raised a whirlwind of controversy, declarations of experi

He had

ments, failures, and success. a host of abettors and antagonists-and by some the originality of his plan was doubted, and by others claimed as their own. A pretty tribe for your learned pen and learned leisure-but I forgot, leisure you will have nonenot a moment, there will be always something to be done, to be looked at, or to be mended. You will be worn to a shred, to a skeleton; you will be pinched like a snipe, and your nose be as sharp -methinks I see you, like him, poking it into the ground to try to live upon suction. It will be the death of you. However, farewell, light lie the earth upon you when you die, for it will be the heaviest of burdens upon you as long as you live. Concern not yourself about your epitaph. That shall be the last office of the pen of your loving and truth-telling friend, not only till, but after death,

I have laughed very heartily, my dear Eusebius, at your fears, real or pretended, respecting my agricultural pursuits. I certainly told you I intended to turn farmer, and it was a specimen of the presumption of speech. I might, with as much truth, have said I was going to set up as physician, because I had recommended a recipe

EUSEBIUS.

for a cold. My farming has been on the smallest scale; yet, small as it has been, I was determined not to reply to your letter, until I could supply you with both the result and detail of my experience. But as, in the interval, you have neither come to me or written to me, nor, as far as I know, acted the cautious friend, by setting unseen