its picturesque scenery. The chief differences that I saw are that some of the smaller farm houses and cottages are in ruins, and that the farms seem to be somewhat larger. Where the ground is fairly level the mowing machine is now used, but in the condition of the farm-yards and the style of the houses I see no advance whatever. Some of the old customs have vanished, for I was unable to obtain any flummery, and on my inquiry for bake-stone bread I found that it was now rarely made. A cake was, however, prepared specially for me, but being made of white American flour it had not the flavour of that which I used so much to enjoy made from the brown flour of home-grown wheat.

THE SOUTH-WALES FARMER

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

IN the following pages I have endeavoured to give a correct idea of the habits, manners, and mode of life of the Welsh hill farmer, a class which, on account of the late Rebecca disturbances, has excited much interest. Having spent some years in Radnorshire, Brecknockshire, Glamorganshire, and other parts of South Wales, and been frequently in the dwellings of the farmers and country people, and had many opportunities of observing their customs and manners, all that I here mention is from my own observation, or obtained by conversation with the parties. I have taken Glamorganshire as the locality of most of what I describe, as I am best acquainted with that part and the borders of Carmarthenshire, where the recent disturbances have been most prominent.

Whenever there is any great difference in neighbouring counties I have noticed it. I may here observe that in Radnorshire the Welsh manners are in a great measure lost with the language, which is entirely English, spoken with more purity than in many parts of England, with the exception of those parts bordering Cardiganshire and Brecknockshire, where the Welsh is still used among the old people, the River Wye, which is the boundary of the latter county and Radnorshire, in its course between Rhayader Gwy and the Hay, also separates the two languages. On the Radnorshire side of the river you will find in nine houses

out of ten English commonly spoken, while directly you have crossed the river, there is as great or a still greater preponderance of Welsh. In the country a few miles round the seaport town of Swansea most of the peculiarities I shall mention may be seen to advantage. In the east and south-eastern parts of Glamorganshire, called the Vale of Glamorgan, the appearance of the country and the inhabitants is much more like those of England. The land is very good and fertile, agriculture is much attended to and practised on much better principles. This part, therefore (the neighbourhood of the towns of Cowbridge and Cardiff), is excepted from the following remarks.

THE SOUTH-WALES FARMER: HIS MODES of Agriculture, DOMESTIC LIFE, CUSTOMS, AND CHARACTER.

THE generality of mountain farms in Glamorganshire and most other parts of South Wales are small, though they may appear large when the number of acres only is considered, a large proportion being frequently rough mountain land. On the average they consist of from twenty to fifty acres of arable land in fields of from four to six, and rarely so much as ten acres; the same quantity of rough, boggy, bushy, rushy pasture, and perhaps as much, or twice as much, short-hay meadow, which term will be explained hereafter; and from fifty to five hundred acres of rough mountain pasture, on which sheep and cattle are turned to pick up their living as they can.

Their system of farming is as poor as the land they cultivate. In it we see all the results of carelessness, prejudice, and complete ignorance. We see the principle of doing as well as those who went before them, and no better, in full operation; the good old system which teaches us not to suppose ourselves capable of improving on the wisdom of our forefathers, and which has made the early polished nations of the East so inferior in every respect to us, whose reclamation from barbarism is ephemeral compared with their long period of almost stationary civilization. The Welshman, when you recommend any improvement in his operations, will tell you, like the Chinaman, that it is an "old custom," and that what did for his forefathers is good enough for him. But let us see if the farmer is so bad as this mode of doing his business may be supposed to make him. In his farmyard we find the buildings with broken and gaping doors, and the floors of the roughest pitching. In one corner is a putrid pond, the overflowings of which empty themselves into the brook below. Into this all the drainings from the dungheaps in the upper part of the yard run, and thus, by evaporation in summer and the running into the brook in winter, full one-half of the small quantity of manure he can obtain (from his cattle spending the greater part of their time on the mountain and in wet bushy pastures) is lost.

The management of his arable land is dreadfully wasteful and injurious.

Of green crops (except potatoes can be so called) he has not the slightest idea, and if he takes no more than three grain crops off the land in succession, he thinks he does very well; five being not uncommon. The first and principal crop is wheat, on which he bestows all the manure he can muster, with a good quantity of lime. He thus gets a pretty good crop. The next year he gets a crop of barley without any manure whatever, and after that a crop of oats, unmanured. He then leaves the field fallow till the others have been treated in the same manner, and then returns to serve it thus cruelly again; first, however, getting his potato crop before his wheat. Some, after the third crop (oats), manure the land as well as they can, and sow barley with clover, which they mow and feed off the second year, and then let it remain as pasture for some time; others, again, have three crops of oats in succession after the wheat and barley, and thus render the land utterly useless for many years.

In this manner the best crops of wheat they can get with abundance of manure, on land above the average quality, is about twenty bushels per acre-ten bushels is, however, more general, and sometimes only seven or eight are obtained.

The rough pastures on which the cattle get their living and waste their manure a great part of the time consist chiefly of various species of rushes and sedges, a few coarse grasses, and gorse and fern on the drier parts. They are frequently, too, covered with brambles, dwarf willows, and alders.

The "short-hay meadows," as they are called, are a class of lands entirely unknown in most parts of England; I shall, therefore, endeavour to describe them.

They consist of large undulating tracts of lands on the lower slopes of the mountains, covered during autumn, winter, and spring with a very short brownish yellow wet turf. In May, June, and July the various plants forming this turf spring up, and at the end of summer are mown, and form "short-hay "; and well it deserves the name, for it is frequently almost impossible to take it up with a hayfork, in which case it is raked up and gathered by armfuls into the cars. The produce varies from two to six hundredweight per acre; four may be about the average, or five acres of land to produce a ton of hay. During the rest of the year it is almost good for nothing. It is astonishing how such stuff can be worth the labour of mowing and making into hay. An English farmer would certainly not do it, but the poor Welshman has no choice; he must either cut his short-hay or have no food for his cattle in the winter; so he sets to, and sweeps away with his scythe a breadth which would astonish an English mower.

The soil which produces these meadows is a poor yellow clay resting on the rock; on the surface of the clay is a stratum of peaty vegetable matter, sometimes of considerable thickness though more generally only a few inches, which collects and retains the moisture in a most remarkable manner, so that though the ground should have a very steep slope the water seems to saturate and cling to it like a sponge, so much so that

after a considerable period of dry weather, when, from the burnt appearance of the surface, you would imagine it to be perfectly free from moisture, if you venture to kneel or lie down upon it you will almost instantly be wetted to the skin.

The plants which compose these barren slopes are a few grasses, among which are the sweet vernal grass (Anthoxanthum odoratum) and the crested hair grass (Kæleria cristata), several Cyperacex-species of carex or sedge which form a large proportion, and the feathery cotton grass (Eriophorum vaginatum). The toad-rush (Juncus bufonius) is frequently very plentiful, and many other plants of the same kind. Several rare or interesting British plants are here found often in great profusion. The Lancashire asphodel (Narthecium ossifragum) often covers acres with its delicate yellow and red blossoms. The spotted orchis (O. maculata) is almost universally present. The butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) is also found here, and the beautiful little pimpernel (Anagallis tenella). The louseworts (Pendicularis sylvatica and P. palustris), the melancholy thistle (Cincus heterophyllus), and the beautiful blue milkwort (Polygala vulgaris), and many others, are generally exceedingly plentiful, and afford much gratification to the botanist and lover of nature.

The number of sheep kept on these farms is about one to each acre of mountain, where they live the greater part of the year, being only brought down to the pastures in the winter, and again turned on the mountain with their lambs in the spring. One hundred acres of pasture and "shorthay meadow" will support from thirty to forty cattle, ten or a dozen calves and oxen being sold each year.

The farmers are almost invariably yearly tenants, consequently little improvement is made even in parts which could be much bettered by draining. The landlord likes to buy more land with his spare capital (if he has any) rather than improve these miserable farms, and the tenant is too poor to lay out money, or if he has it will not risk his being obliged to leave the farm or pay higher rent in return for his permanently improving another person's land.

The hedges and gates are seldom in sufficiently good repair to keep out cattle, and can hardly be made to keep out mountain sheep, who set them completely at defiance, nothing less than a six-foot stone wall, and not always that, serving to confine them. The farmer consequently spends a good deal of his time in driving them out of his young clover (when he has any) or his wheat. He is also constantly engaged in disputes, and not unfrequently litigation, with his neighbours, on account of the mutual trespasses of their stock.

The Welshman is by no means sharp-sighted when his cattle are enjoying themselves in a neighbour's field, especially when the master is from home, otherwise the fear of the "pound" will make him withdraw them after a short time.

On almost every farm water is very plentiful, often far too much so, and it is sometimes run over a meadow, but in such a manner as to lose one-half of the advantage which might be derived from it. The

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farmer is contented with merely cutting two or three gaps in the watercourse at the top, from which the water flows over the field as it best can, scarcely wetting some parts and making complete pools in others.

Weeding he considers quite an unnecessary refinement, fit only for those who have plenty of money to waste upon their fancies-except now and then, when the weeds have acquired an alarming preponderance over the crop, he perhaps sets feebly to work to extract the more prominent after they have arrived at maturity and the mischief is done. His potatoes are overrun with persicarias, docks, and spurges; his wheat and barley with corn cockle, corn scabious, and knapweed, and his pastures with thistles, elecampine, etc., all in the greatest abundance. If you ask him why he leaves his land in such a disgraceful state, and try to impress upon him how much better crops he would have if he cleared it, he will tell you that he does not think they do much harm, and that if he cleaned them this year, there would be as many as ever next year, and, above all, that he can't afford it, asking you where he is to get money to pay people for doing it.

The poultry, geese, ducks, and fowls are little attended to, being left to pick up their living as well as they can. Geese are fattened by being turned into the corn stubble, the others are generally killed from the yard. The fowls, having no proper places to lay in, are not very profitable with regard to eggs, which have to be hunted for and discovered in all sorts of places. This applies more particularly to Glamorganshire, which is in a great measure supplied with eggs and poultry from Carmarthenshire, or Sir Gaer" (pronounced there gar), as it is called in Welsh, where they manage them much better.

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If there happens to be in the neighbourhood any one who farms on the improved English system, has a proper course of crops, with turnips, etc., folds his sheep, and manages things in a tidy manner, it is impossible to make the Welshman believe that such a way of going on pays; he will persist that the man is losing money by it all the time, and that he only keeps it on because he is ashamed to confess the failure of his new method. Even should the person go on for many years, to all appearance prosperously and in everybody else's eyes be making money by his farm, still the Welshman will declare that he has some other source from which he draws to purchase his dear-bought farming amusement, and that the time will come when he will be obliged to give it up; and though you tell him that the greater part of the land in England is farmed in that manner, and ask him whether he thinks they can all be foolish enough to go on losing money year after year, he is still incredulous, says that he knows "the nature of farming," and that such work as that can never pay. While the ignorance which causes this incredulity exists, it is evidently a difficult task to improve him.