land is what they call season land, which, though not poor in the sense of barrenness, is on account of its nature and of the elevation and climate of the locality unable to stand either drought or long-continued wet and cold, and therefore is only fertile in genial seasons, which in the eighties were conspicuous by their absence. I rarely finished harvest at that time till the end of September, and sometimes not till October; and though I did my best to hasten the deliberate operations of the farm and sow early, I found that we were often three weeks or a month behind Hamp¬ shire, Essex or Norfolk. No one realises till he has tried what an im¬ mense advantage early seasons give in cleaning and cropping the land; but early sowing will not do in a late climate, and though the best crop of wheat I ever grew (forty-two bushels to the acre without manure) was sown in the second week of September, I found that some of my more dilatory neighbours often did nearly as well. It is no use being in a hurry in farming, you cannot hurry either the men, the cattle or the weather, on which your success mainly depends; and when a man cannot learn to look on the hindrances which constantly thwart his efforts to get on, if not with perfect equanimity at least without making himself miserable, he is not lit for a farmer.
I found that with so much com to thresh it was almost necessary to have an engine of my own, and after much deliberation and inquiry, invested in a now locomotive by Fowler, a fine powerful and well-built engine, which after using for twelve or thirteen years I finally sold for half what it cost me. It is a wonder we did not bring her to grief in going up and down some of the steep hills, where more than once I have seen the water running out of the boiler on a grade of perhaps one in four. Though my driver was a farm labourer, who had only had a week’s training from Fowler’s man who came down with the engine, he never had the least accident, and besides the threshing used to haul an eight-ton truck of coal from Cheltenham. It; became a question whether it was necessary to take out a ₤10 licence for my engine, as, though engines used for agricultural purposes only were exempt, the authorities differed as to whether hauling coal for a farmer’s fire, or bricks to build a farm labourer’s house, were bona fide agricultural purposes. I declined to pay, however, and the matter was never pressed,
Other landowners in the neighbourhood were farming largely at this time. Some had such large areas of their property in hand that I could ride ten miles between Cirencester and Cheltenham on land occupied by the owners.
My nearest neighbour, a retired mill-owner, who had more money to spend than most landowners, spent it without stint, or rather his agent did, and rebuilt all his farm buildings, laid on water over the whole estate, and topped his walls with such big and sharp-edged stones that when the hounds went over his land I often wished that he was a hunting man like his predecessor, who was the best neighbour I ever had. So many little questions which arise between neighbours about boundary fences, locked gates, rights of way, game and so on, lead to friction with your neighbours if they are not neighbourly; and I very nearly had what might have been a costly lawsuit if I had not been well advised by my friend
