and North America. In the palmy days of Cotswold sheep these used to be numerous and rich. William Lane used to tell me how three Kentucky gentlemen arrived at his farm one day and went away with three ram lambs for which they paid him £210. Another friend, who was a great cricketer, related how, when he had a shire stallion to sell, an American came to his house when he was away at a cricket match and after looking at the horse, for which he was asking £100, followed him to the cricket ground and accosted him just as he came off the field in a bad humour at having been run out. My friend said he had come there not to sell horses but to play cricket, and promptly asked £150, which he eventually got, the most profitable run out he ever had. I could tell how an Irishman from the Argentine came to Colesborne when I was in Norway and paid my bailiff £115 for seven rams, which was £35 more than I should have taken for them.
But these sort of customers were few and far between. Germans would come or write and want to get the pick of one’s sheep at £7, and as they did not know which were the best we generally managed to suit them at a little more than this, though I always took care to get the money before the sheep left the place. German dealers are especially hard to bargain with, and at Hamburg they combined to prevent anyone selling direct to the people who wanted them. In fact there is nearly as much coping about the business as in horse-dealing, and as year by year my sheep got better, but the prices got worse, I found it a difficult matter to dispose of shearlings,
So I bought some first-class blackfaccd Scotch ewes, crossed them with Cotswolds and produced an animal which I flattered myself was superior to the Leicester or Wensleydale cross. Professor Wallace, who was then Professor of Agriculture at the Cirencester College and by far the most practical and able Professor of Agriculture I ever knew, took a lot of my ram lambs to use on his sheep farm in Dumfriesshire, and found them as hardy and in some ways better than the Yorkshire rams he had previously used. Mr. Tetley, a Yorkshire wool buyer and manu¬ facturer, said the wool of the Cotswold blackfaced cross was the best cross-bred wool he had ever bought, and took a number of rams to place among his neighbours.
Fortified by these opinions, I accepted an invitation from Mr. Elliot of Clifton Park, near Kelso, to go and stay with him, and sent a lot of rams with a cross-bred wether as a sample of their produce to the great Kelso ram sales in September. This sale is the meeting-place of all the breeders in Scotland, Ireland and the North of England, and some of the most knowing sheep-men in the world are there. As no one had seen the cross before, my wether was the object of much curiosity and speculation as to his weight. I had been killing his fellows for my own table and had a pretty firm belief that he would dress over 100 pounds. But this idea was laughed to scorn by the knowing ones, and as I was willing to back my opinion I got on several small bets and it was arranged that he should be killed the next day to see who was right. Some men went as low as ten stone, most about eleven, one or two allowed he might be as much as twelve, but only one, a butcher of Jedburgh, agreed with me. So
