him, is written in a lively, humorous vein; scientific terms are made to wear a homely English dress; and truth, without losing a particle of its importance, insinuates itself in such a good-natured way, that the most obstinate lover of old farming usages can hardly, we should think, have the heart to give it other than a favourable reception.

Some years ago, it appears, when scientific farming, Hercules-like, was struggling with lions in its cradle, our chronicler suddenly and undesiringly came into the possession of a farm of 250 acres, consisting geologically of successive strata of blue, red, and white clays, yellow sand, grey gravelly conglomerate, red marl, and black peat-a subsoil that had been found utterly unworkable, and that, preventing the winter rains, as it did, from draining off, kept the surface submerged for months beneath stagnant waters, to the ruin of all tillage. The deplorable condition in which the author found this boggy inheritance is thus graphically and wittily described:-"It had been performing for a series of years a sort of geometrical progression' -downwards. Each incoming tenant took it at about half the previous rent; dabbled about for a year or two, like a duck, and retired-lame.' It was but a simple equation-a very simple one-to say when the rent would come to zero. It looked on the rental-book like an annual sum in reduction."

Entertaining the strongest repugnance and aversion to such farming occupations as he had been accustomed to witness-a feeling which the sight of this dreary and pestilential waste by no means tended to diminish-circumstances, nevertheless, overbore our chronicler's reluctance; and one fine morning, as he tells us, he almost jumped a yard backward at seeing his own name inscribed upon a wagon! It appears, however, that our young husbandman had read all the best practical works upon farming then extant, by which process he had imbibed certain theories which were pronounced heretical in those days, and which led to his being given up by the agricultural " faculty" as a confirmed "book-farmer. Well, no sooner did he find himself installed in the old farm-house, where the land-steward had just died of influenza caught upon the "marsh," as he called it, than he resolved to test the value of his speculations. Draining was the first task in the order of remedial measures; and great beyond expression was the astonishment of the neighbours when the arrival of load after load of draining-tiles gave notice of an intention to drain a region that all ancient authority had pronounced undrainable. But we will suffer our chronicler to speak for himself, in his own singular style.

666

horns.

tained an ambiguous term. Picture to yourself, however, the following conclusion from it. A bleak, foggy November day: a long rambling space, marsh or meadow, as you might choose to call it, of some acres in extent, and about the third part of a mile in length, with a narrow thick plantation of rushes, sedges, and brooklime, and such aquatic vegetation, threading its way in one long dank line from end to end, by such fantastic meanderings that it looked as if the hidden channel of choked moisture it concealed had been making a continued series of experiments from time out of mind in search of an outlet; and after centuries of struggle and disappointment, had at length arrived quite by accident at a certain point, at one end of the meadow-where you might see a pair of high mudboots standing, or rather soaking, with a man in them, peering through a telescope on three legs, as if he was watching for the total eclipse of a small boy that is to be seen, gradually sinking, about fifty yards off, and clutching in his agony a high staff by his side, figured as if for high and low water-mark.

Presently the boots and the telescope, after various ineffectual efforts and heavings, succeed in striking their quarters; the boy, after sundry spasmodic struggles to correspond, achieves the same exploit; and the same scene as before occurs again some fifty yards further on, and again, and again, at the same intervals, until they reach the other end of the meadow, and come plump upon the banks of a marshy pool some six acres in extent. On attaining this point, the telescope is suddenly shut up with a triumphant snap; its three legs jump into one; the dripping, shivering boy receives a tremendous involuntary thwack on the back, and a fall of nine feet is declared-like a dividend of ten per cent. and a balance over to go on with." Our non-professional readers will of course understand, that without this fall or slope the field would have been undrainable; and that, although the spot looked level to the eye, it had been found, as just stated by the author, by the new instrument, to have actually a descent of nine feet.

Having thus convicted "antiquity" of error in the dogmatic verdict it had pronounced, and proved the feasibility of his grand draining scheme, now came those formidable practical difficulties which usually attend the career of improvement and reform. If the soil was stubborn and intractable, our experimentalist found those to whom he was compelled to entrust the execution of the work were still more so. As the success of his plan must depend on the depth, evenness, and ac curacy of the drain-on the principle that the worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and But why can't it be drained?' asked Green-permanence of the entire work, just as the weak

"Because there's no fall!' replied collective Wisdom.

"Has it ever been tried with a spirit-level?' "Now this was not a fair question. Spiritlevels (if they had any meaning or existence at all) were unintelligible mathematical-looking instruments of purely professional nature, only seen in the hands of road-surveyors' assistants and people of that sort. They had nothing whatever to do with farming. The question was unfair: it con

́est link of a chain is the measure of its strengthit became a matter of the utmost importance that his instructions should be most scrupulously obeyed. Does any one, at all acquainted with the obstinate tenacity of old habits and traditional authority, suppose for a moment that our ardent land-reformer could get his explicit directions observed? Let us hear what he says on this point. Presuming that the new plan had just been most distinctly expounded by him to his workmen, our chronicler remarks:

"But this of course was all theory, and theory of course was all nonsense: my practical headdrainer was quite of a different way of thinking, as his modus operandi will exhibit. The morning after he had commenced operations I found him hard at work cutting a drain, about eighteen inches deep, laying in the tiles one by one, and filling the earth in over them as he went! The field I had begun upon was very large and very flat; and in order to increase artificially the fall, I had calculated so as to make the drain eighteen inches deeper at the mouth than at the tail. I might as well have calculated the distance of a telescopic star.

"I've been a-draining this forty year and more-I ought to know summut about it!' Need I tell you who said this? or give you the whole of the colloquy to which it furnished the epilogue? "I had begun something in this way: Why, my good friend! what are you about? Didn't I tell you to lay the drain open from bottom to top, and that not a tile was to be put in till I had seen it, and tried the levels?' etc. etc. Old as Adam was the whole dialogue-it is idle to go through it; Conceit versus Prejudice-the ignorance of the young against the ignorance of the old-the thing that has been, and will be, as long as 'the sun and moon endureth.' It ended as I have said :-'I've been a-draining this forty year and more-I ought to know summut about it!'

66

Here was a staggerer. Amongst all my calculations to think that I should never have calculated on this!..... Here I was, fairly planted, at the first onset. Every inch of depth was of real value at the mouth of so long a line of drain. Three feet deep at the outlet' was the modest extent of my demand; and there I stood, watching the tiles thrown in pêle-mêle to a depth of eighteen inches, which I was given to understand was about two feet,' with as cool an indifference to the other foot, as if two and three had been recently determined by the common assent of mankind to mean the same thing.

""But I must have it three feet deep!' 'Oh, it's no use: it'll never drain so deep as that through this here clay!'

"But I tell you it must be! There can be no

fall without it.'

Well, I've been a-draining this forty year, and I ought to know summut about it!'

"From that moment I date my experience in the trials and troubles of farming: at that instant my eyes began to open to the true meaning of those practical difficulties' which the uninitiated laugh at because they have never encountered them; and which the man of science despises, who has said to steam, water, and machinery, Do this,' and they do it; but has never known what it is to try and guide out of the old track, a mind that has run in the same rut this forty year and more.' This same incorrigible mind was however at length, by a piece of clever policy, brought over to the new views, and the drain was laid according to the wish of the young theorist.

After this came the combination of the different strata of the soil, and the flattening of the ridges, to the amazement and inexpressible perplexity of all on-lookers, and they were pretty numerous. The pleasantries that were aimed at our chronicler

during the next few months are well depicted in the following passage, to appreciate which it must be borne in mind that the "queer stuff" dug out of the drains had been spread upon the face of the field, to the scandal of all farming authorities:"And a very curious-looking field it made for the livelong winter that ensued. Wise men came from all quarters of the compass to look at it. Some of their remarks and questions were very flattering. Where had I purchased my winter top-dressing? as they should like to buy some at the same shop, cost what it might.' What winter-crop was I growing so carefully under the variegated carpet?" To all which I answered with becoming gravity, and modesty of my own merit. Some of the remarks being of a more mysterious character, I entered in my farm-journal for future explanation and experience; such, for instance, as that of an old gentleman who, shutting one eye, (I suppose it was a habit,) told me with great blandness of manner that I had put my foot in it.' (What could he mean ?) Another, too, was so full of general good wishes, that he wished I might get it' more than once; which I thought all the more good-natured, as he did not even stay to particu larize what crop he alluded to as wishing me to get, or how much per acre.'

"

But truth, however much at a discount for a time, is sure in the long run to justify itself to the candid and discerning. Accordingly, as soon as spring with its genial influences appeared, the current of opinion respecting this curious field, upon which all the wits in the neighbourhood had expended their jokes, began strangely to alter. The under-wagoner had told somebody, in strict confidence, that the snow had disappeared on that field much "sooner than from any other." The huge lumps of clay, too, had " 'kicked down to ashes;" but what topped everything was that before even bean-sowing had begun, the "motley close," as the field in question was called, was reported "as dry as a bone." Other improvements meanwhile were going on upon the farm. Down went fence after fence, bank after bank, tree after tree, and jungle after jungle, that had from time immemorial harboured rabbits and vermin innumerable, besides shutting out light and air, and shedding a blighting influence over acres of land. Each of these innovations upon the good old farming prac tices of our ancestors was invariably accompanied by a prediction of ruin, but succeeded in the issue by an admission of success, which encouraged our husbandman to persevere in his own course. The soil, so long poisoned by the stagnant waters which it had retained in its bosom, was sweetened by the application of large quantities of lime; while its reproductive powers were vastly augmented by the liberal administration of guano-a manure which at that period was only just beginning to be heard of. In these and other improvements our enter prising theorist sunk about 101. upon every acre. After this expenditure of labour and capital, we, not without some anxiety, inquire for the results of this new treatment of lands that had threatened at no distant day to go out of cultivation altogether. Well, then, on one field of ten acres-one half of which had been sown with the "magic compound" just referred to, while the other five acres had received a hundred cart-loads of the "good old farm

yard stuff"-the relative value of the two systems | the radius from a central shaft, which bristles all was convincingly tested! The field was devoted around with a forest of such arms-a sort of reto a crop of Swedish turnips-the first that had volving Briareus." This "steam-cultivator" is to ever been heard of on the farm, and the last, in the do its work by traction-not by its rolling weight opinion of all surrounding wisdom, that would ever-first cutting its own trench, burying itself to the be tried upon it. Many were the smiles, winks, required depth, and then commencing its onward murmurings, shakes of the head, and other task, tearing down the bank (so to speak) on the demonstrations, jocular and serious, of those who advancing side, canting back the pulverized soil, engaged in the preliminary operations, or who earth's sawdust, "comminuted, aërated, and inwitnessed the application of the new manure. As verted," into the trench it makes as it proceeds; if to try, too, the enterprising farmer, it proved a and thus leaving behind a fully prepared seed-bed, miserable year for turnips generally, and every- seven or eight inches deep, never to be gone over where "the fly" was omnipotent and omnivorant. again except by the drill. Such is, in brief, his On that part of the field tilled after the old fashion picture of the "steam-cultivator," the construction a crop about the size of apples came up. of which seems to be one of the most pressing desiderata of British agriculture. And who, that remembers the beautiful instruments collected in the south area of the Great Exhibition, will despair of its being one day invented?

hundred years and more. But no! Twice they have been filled, we are told, for different purposes. Once, when the Emperor Joseph of Austria visited this part of his dominions, the people got up a bull-bait in the arena. The seats were all crowded then, and the concourse hailed his majesty as Cæsar, as Augustus. A second time multitudes swarmed upon it, tier upon tier, when the pope visited the city, and there presented himself, holding out his hands to bless the people. But neither Joseph nor the pope seems to harmonize with the place; and one's thoughts were again carried back to Roman times and things; and so one sat and mused, over and over, the story of that great empire, of which it is so remarkable a memorial --and of its growth, decline, and fall. I thought of the only other Roman amphitheatre I had ever seen, far different from this, at Silchester-a small amphitheatre, all the seats gone, everything gone but the old mounds of earth which formed it ages since, now grass-grown, and the covered way through which the animals were led out on the arena. Other amphitheatres, too, which I had never seen, came in imagination with associated events.

There stands in Rome, at the foot of the palatine mount, the magnificent ruin of the Colosseum, built by Vespasian. Its walls inclose a space of five acres of ground. Loftily do they rise, attaining the height of one hundred and sixty feet, and exhibiting four tiers of columns-Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian. Its internal appearance must have been similar to the amphitheatre at Verona, only far more spacious, for the seats accommodated no less than 87,000 spectators.

From Verona I transported myself there, and fancied I was occupying one of those seats in the year of grace 110. The spacious edifice is crowded to the top. Senators and magistrates of Rome, ambassadors to the eternal city from distant lands, matrons and maidens of the noblest families, are filling the front and most conspicuous places, and exhibiting an array of majesty and beauty on which many an eye turns with admiration; while the vulgar multitude in dense masses cover the rest of the amphitheatre-a forest of eager faces, an immense piece of living mosaic. The spectacle they have come to witness begins. Gladiators are led along the arena in procession, matched by pairs. The shield is on their arms, the sword glitters in their hand, a piece of stuff is wrapped round their loins, the upper part of their person remains naked. Now for the signal, and the bloody conflict! The immense concourse, stern and cruel, the milk of human kindness in their breasts all curdled, look with amazing gusto on these devoted victims, as they mangle and slay each other.

So do the civilized and polished but pagan Romans divert themselves! The amusements are drawing to a close, but the appetite for slaughter on the part of the spectators is unappeased. To their delight, another victim is introduced, and one such as they had never beheld before. "Tis no Dacian gladiator, no stern barbarian, but a meek and aged man, fourscore years of age; his form bent with infirmity, his head sprinkled with a few grey hairs. Hastily led on the arena, amidst wild shouts, he is come, not to fight with a human foe, but to be the prey of those lions, growling in

yonder den. Rough has been the voyage from Antioch, and strenuous the efforts of the men to reach Rome in time. "Forasmuch," says the emperor, who condemned him in his own city"forasmuch as he carries in his heart the crucified One, we command that he be carried, bound by soldiers, to the great Rome, there to be thrown to the beasts, for the entertainment of the people." "I thank thee, O Lord," replied the aged man, "that thou hast vouchsafed to honour me with a perfect love towards thee, and hast made me to be put into iron bonds with the apostle Paul." It need not be said who was that old man from Antioch. Not with stoical apathy did Ignatius meet his fate, but with gentleness, patience, love; his eyes uplifted to heaven, his countenance brightened by hope-a lamb thrown to the lions; and by his meekness and Christian heroism exhibiting that which Romans were not wont to look upon, and which surely must have touched some even of their iron hearts, and sent them home to think upon a religion which could yield such fruits as this.

Lyons, in France, had one of these buildings, devoted to amusement and torture. I seemed to be there too, in the year 177 A.D. The sons of Gaul, the daughters of the land, and their Roman masters, throng the space allotted to spectatorscome expressly to witness the sufferings of Christians, residing in the city, who, amidst the frenzy of persecution which rages throughout Lyons, have been imprisoned and tortured, and are now to be put to death. There is Blandina, and there the boy Ponticus, just fifteen years of age-the two survivors of a band of martyrs, who have nobly died. She has been exposed to the wild beasts before, but has escaped their fury. Her inhuman foes resolve that this time they will not be disappointed. She is but a slave, yet has she all the mild and gentle dignity of a Christian heroine; and while submitting to the death, she refuses the honourable name of a martyr, that being a title which, she says, should be given only to Him, who is the "faithful and true witness." How she cheers the suffering boy, as he goes through the circle of his tortures, and refuses to swear by the gods, till, having endured every kind of torment, he expires. Now her own turn comes, and she is scourged, then placed on an iron chair, and scorched over an intense fire, and then inclosed in a net, and thrown to a bull, to be tossed and lacerated by the horns of the animal, till the sword of a soldier is plunged into her body, and her spirit ascends to her Father in heaven. "The blessed Blandina," writes one of the witnesses of her death, "having, like a good mother, encouraged her children, and sent them before victors to the King, after having again measured over the same course of combats that her sons had passed through, hastened to them, rejoicing and exulting at her departure, as if she had been invited to a weddingsupper, and not cast to wild beasts."

The remembrance of that morning in the amphitheatre at Verona, with its suggestion of things better than itself, does one good.*

Rev. J. Stoughton, just published, and abounding in passages From a volume entitled "Scenes in other Lands," by of great elegance and descriptive power.

A VISIT TO THE STAFFORDSHIRE POT. | byshire chertz, until it is reduced to so fine a state

TERIES.

III.-A MORNING AT COPELAND'S.

as to offer no perceptible grittiness to the taste. The granite is reduced by similar means to the same degree of fineness; and the bones, being first calcined, undergo the same ceremony, though these are only used in the composition of china ware. All these are diluted with water according to established ratios, the amount of earthy matter mixed with the fluid being ascertained by weight; thus, supposing a pint of water to weigh sixteen ounces, a pint of clay slip weighs twenty-four, of flint slip thirty-two, and of granite slip perhaps thirty; or either of them or all of them may vary from these weights, as they probably do in various manufactories, according to the scale of propor tions adopted by different makers.

THE readers of the "Leisure Hour" may probably have imagined that it is now quite time that we should introduce them to the potter at his work, and afford them an opportunity of witnessing some portion at least of those operations, of the importance of which he has learned to entertain a due appreciation. So we are going this morning, by favour of the proprietor, to stroll for an hour or two through the factory of Alderman Copeland, in | company with an experienced and intelligent guide, who will direct our footsteps through the devious labyrinth of some fourteen acres in extent, and explain what is unintelligible by us at a cursory Supposing the materials to be ground and diluted glance. The interior of a pot-work does not pre- to the required degree, and pure from extraneous sent to the spectator many elements of the pic-matters, they are then carried to a chamber in an turesque; as much of the surface of the ground as can be conveniently inclosed, so as to leave room for the passage in every direction of carts and wagons, is covered with plain brick buildings of no architectural pretensions, and of very various height; and among them, at a few paces distant from each other, rise a series of huge dome-like cones of blueish brick to the height of some forty or fifty feet, and terminating in open chimneys, from some of which lurid flames are leaping forth. The only perforation in the surface of these monstrous and grim-looking fabrics is a single doorway, through the dark openings of which here and there red fires are seen to glimmer, and the sound of rushing flame strikes upon the ear. Around some of their broad swelling basements flights of steps coil up to warehouses or counting-houses built against their sides: some are cold and empty; others are yielding up the contents of the last baking; and others again are loading with fresh wares to undergo the fiery ordeal. As we have expressed a wish to begin at the beginning, we follow our leader through various turnings and windings, through hot rooms and cold rooms, within doors and without, to the immediate neighbourhood of a steam-engine which works the machinery, by the aid of which the raw materials are prepared for the manipulations of the workmen. Here we are in presence of large reserves of the different natural products used in the manufacture of pottery, consisting of various kinds of clay brought from Devonshire and Dorsetshire, and the china clay, as it is called, a species of decomposed felspar from Cornwall, together with stores of flint from Gravesend and the neighbourhood, a light kind of granite stone, and the bones of animals, as well as the clays and marl of the district, and other things besides.

The first operation of the potter is to prepare these different materials for combination together in order to form the pure and plastic composition of which his wares are formed. To this end the clays are thrown into large vats, where they are diluted with water to the consistency known as "slip," which is not thicker than cream, or hardly so thick. The flint is first calcined in the fire, and then broken into small pieces by the action of a series of iron punches worked by steam; it is then ground with water in large circular open vats Between stones of a tough texture, known as Der

upper story, where they are mixed together in certain proportions in a large vat, the sides of which are perfectly vertical, and the quantity of each material to be used is marked on a rod or gaugestick, which the workman who superintends the process dips into the vat while the different slips are poured in, until each rises to its proper mark on the gauge. In the centre of the vat revolves a pole furnished with lateral arms, by the aid of which the whole of the mixtures are set in rapid motion and thoroughly incorporated together. When these various fluids have been thus mingled and blended together into one kind of slip, it is drawn off into a cistern having an outlet into a long wooden trough, flat at the bottom, which is pierced with holes nearly an inch in diameter and two or three feet apart. Through these holes the fluid slip falls in a continuous stream perpendicu larly upon a series of fine sieves made of silk, containing six hundred threads to the inch: the sieves are shaken perpetually backwards and forwards by the action of machinery, and the slip passing into a receptacle beneath, leaves the coarser grains of earthy matter from which it is freed behind, in the form of small balls of clay of various sizes and shapes, which it assumes through the regular mo tion of the sieve. The slip is thus purified several times, through a series of sieves, after which it is pumped into a reservoir, from whence it is drawn off into enormous shallow drying-pans or troughs, paved with tiles, and some twenty yards or more in length and seven or eight feet in width. Flues from large fires are conducted under the whole length of these pans, and the fires being lighted, the slip soon begins to boil, and in the course of a few hours steams off the superfluous water, and dries gradually to the consistence of new putty or soft clay. It would now be fit for the use of the potter were it not for the quantity of air shut up in its substance, owing to the evolution of steam in the process of drying. To get rid of this, it is cut out in masses of about a foot square from the pans, and carried to a singular sort of mill which kneads the air out of it. This curious machine resembles a funnel-shaped barrel, much larger at the top than at the bottom; in the centre is a stout rod armed with broad steel blades, having their ends pressed downwards. The clay, in bulky lumps, is thrown in at the top; the blades, which stick out on all sides of the rod, are continually