was impossible to weigh wool with him. Usually he was between the two states, but on one occasion when he was just on enough to be merry my friend Faunce de Laune, a great Kentish sheep-breeder, sat for hours roaring with laughter at his ways and jokes, all in the broadest possible Cotswold dialect. I knew no one who can speak Gloucestershire like that now- There are a few villages where the old people still talk it fairly, but not as they did before the days of railways and schools.
Of late years I have given up the old practice of selling at home and have sent my wool to my friend Mr. J.W. Turner of Bradford, who does his best with a very difficult business. But though you get rid of a good deal of trouble and some risk in this way, it has always seemed to me that prices are as high if not higher at the auction sales in the south and west of England, where most people now market their wool, as at Bradford where it is mostly sorted.
During my first ten years' farming I used oxen for ploughing, as was general in the Cotswold hills. Six were driven in a team, with collars, not yokes, but I never heard why collars were preferred. It was the custom and that was enough reason for anything in rural England. Herc- fords were the favourite breed, as it was found that they kept their con¬ dition better on coarse food than any other breed. A few farmers bred them, but most bought them at two years old, say for about £15 each, and after working them four seasons sold them in autumn to feeders, or in the spring to Somersetshire graziers. These bullocks used to be of great size and weight, and a very usual price for them when fairly fresh was £30 apiece, whilst when fat they made £40 to £50. As they lived in winter almost entirely on straw, with a little meal the first year or two, and in summer grazed the roughest pastures, they did not cost much to keep, and kept growing into money. Six in a double plough would do as much as four horses, and though slow, seemed to get over the work as fast because they were never taken off for other jobs; and the effect of six heavy oxen treading the land was almost as good as a roll on our light but rather sticky soil.
But when the same popular taste which no longer favoured Cotswold mutton protested against big beef also, the demand for these heavy bullocks fell off until I have seen them sold for £18 to £20, whilst little ripe two or three year old steers, half their age and half their weight, made nearly as much. As I laid down the worst of my arable land by degrees, or let it tumble down, and straw became less abundant, I had to scheme—not how to get rid of it as rapidly as possible, as some Wiltshire farmers used to do by “making it down” into something which re¬ sembled much in an open yard—but to economise it as much as possible. So I gave up ploughing with oxen by degrees, and built Dutch barns to cover my hay and corn and save thatching. This is one of the few innovations in agriculture which has been really profitable, and I believe that two of my original barns, now twenty years old, have saved their cost three or four times over. Dutch barns are one of the few permanent erections which I have known Cotswold tenant farmers put up at their own cost, for whatever may be the desire among tenant farmers in some more favoured counties, I can only say that an "unexhausted improve-
