which were the principal) if not the only, crops grown here in former times, it has to be treated with great skill and experience, and requires summer fallowing to keep it anything like clean. The soil is what they call brick-eartli in Essex, a deep alluvial soil whose fertility seems to be inexhaustible, and though the high cost of labour, and the low price of corn, have forced me to lay it nearly all to grass, it would in any country but England be considered as valuable arable land. Ilarcs and partridges also thrive upon it and the birds never get so wild here as they do in other places. I once shot fifteen brace to my own gun here on the first of February without dogs or keeper, and today, though we are combining business with sport, we pick up ten brace and eleven rabbits, which added to the ducks make a very pretty little winter’s bag.
The partridges here, when disturbed, usually take refuge on some rough long grass which has been left for the sheep to pull off during snow or frost, and fly to the sea walls and saltings which are outside the wall and protect it from the wash of the waves. These saltings are covered with a peculiar salt-loving herbage, and are intersected with many wind¬ ing natural ditches formed by the ebb and flow of the tide, which covers them at high water, The partridges nearly always lie close on. the sea banks and saltings and afford most sporting shots as one walks along the top of the wall. They often fall in the salt water, and if only winged hide very close in the mud-holes and ditches. Hares also are very fond of the saltings, though they seem to come there to feed and not to lie, and are usually off before one gets within shot. They must frequently swim over the main channels, which arc fifty to one hundred yards wide, as though the greater part of them were drowned in the great flood of November, 1897, stock soon got up again, and now there are so many that we are catching them alive to stock other places with. Shooting hares is poor sport in my judgment, and as they are worth fourteen or fifteen shillings alive they add something to tire profits of the farm when treated as live-stock.
All round the island in the main channels oyster boats are at work dredging and clearing the ground, as they say, this part of the Essex coast being celebrated for its oysters, which on account of the scare about typhoid fever are not now so valuable as formerly, and arc sold on the spot at twelve shillings per hundred. There cannot, however, be the very slightest risk of infection from oysters which are grown and fattened so far from any possible source of infection as these, and the four hundred per annum which I receive as a customary present from the oystermen for allowing them to lay their catch on my saltings are much appreciated by my friends. The oystermen are a different and generally very superior class of men to the agricultural labourers of this district. Nearly all fine, strong, hardy men, well clothed and spending most of their time in their boats, they have regular work and regular wages all the year round, though some of them work on barges and yachts in summer. The labourers, however, who used to do the work on these marsh farms are anything but a steady or superior class. The strongest and most active of them now mostly work on the brickfields, where they earn very high wages, most of which is spent on eating and drinking; and the casuals whom we
