when next day the scales showed that his dead-weight was 104 pounds I pocketed the half-crowns and laughed at the Scotchmen. But though ’they were willing to try a ram or two on low terms, they were too canny to embark in a new cross till they knew more about it; and after paying expenses I did not have much of an average. I had a very pleasant visit, however, and learnt a good deal from Mr. Elliot’s experiments in laying land down to grass, a subject in which he has for many years been a great enthusiast. I also had what I think was the best day’s partridge shooting I ever enjoyed, and it is worth describing to show how good the sport in this country is.
Mr. Elliot was not a very keen sportsman at the time and was more anxious in the morning to show me his grass fields than to look for partridges, so that when we came into lunch I had only killed a brace. As he did not care to go on after lunch I hurried back with the keeper to where I knew there were plenty of birds, and, as often happens when one is shooting alone and can pick one’s birds without regard to another gun, shot well and steadily. We had a clever old pointer and a good retriever, and before the birds left the turnips we had more than the keeper could carry. We then went to some fields where the barley was in stook. The birds lay beautifully, and I remember one particular narrow field where the dog found six lots and I got six rights and lefts successively and picked up thirteen birds. I came home much pleased at 6.30 with thirty-two brace to my own gun all killed after lunch. Two or three years afterwards I was shooting the same ground with a new keeper, and when we came into this field he said to me, “ They’re telling me this is a grand place for birds; there was a man from the south killed thirty- two brace in this field without missing a shot.”
To return, however, to our sheep. I had good opportunities on different farms of trying various crosses, and was asked later to contribute an article on “Cross-bred Sheep” to the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. This paper was published in 1890 and attracted a good deal of favourable comment in the agricultural papers as a practical and not theoretical paper. Extracts from it were copied and translated in the French, American and Scotch papers, and if anything would have made the Cotswold breed popular abroad this ought to have done it.
But by this time the Lincolns, whose wool has always been of a brighter and more lustrous character than ours, mostly in consequence of their better soil and partly because the Lincoln breeders have paid more atten¬ tion to the quality than the Cotswold men have done, began to take a prominent position among the New Zealand and Argentine breeders of mutton for export, and whilst the Lincoln rams were in great demand ours were a drug on the market. No doubt the favour with which Lincolns are regarded by foreign wool-growers is partly due to the fact that they are always shown with their wool artificially greased, which gives it a much softer feel, whilst our sheep are shown clean-washed. But when wool got down to £1 a tod, and culled ram tegs, which in 1883 had made 92s., got down to 42s., I thought it was time to give them up, and have now crossed my few remaining ewes and gone out of ram-breeding. Other much older and better judges than myself still breed Cotswolds,
