now cut it fresh for stall-feeding, as the most profitable use of it. The next is to graze it as it grows throughout the season; and, while the amount of it limits their stock of cattle, they are sure to find out that to lay it by for winter cannot answer when hay can be brought in any quantity from abroad, and the materials for the winter feeding of stock are multiplying year by year. A sensible farmer of North Carolina has made himself the object of persecution by the whole body of American slaveholders, by his publication of the striking fact (among many which prove the bad economy of slave labour), that the hay crop alone of the free States exceeds in value the total production of the Southern States—cotton, tobacco, sugar, and everything else that is grown there. The wheat, corn, timber, and manufactures of the free States are all so much surplus over the natural wealth of the Slave States, which is overbalanced by the hay of the North alone. This discovery is the immediate occasion of the revolution now proceeding in the United States, where the organisation of Congress was last winter made to turn on the aid given to the circulation of Mr. Helper’s book, in which this discovery of the relative wealth of the free and the slave States was published two years ago. The attempt was to exclude from the Speakership in Congress any public man who had assisted in the propagation of Mr. Helper’s book, “The Impending Crisis of the South;” and it was the discussion of a resolution to that effect which delayed the appointment of a Speaker for nearly three months of the Session. The anti-slavery party won the day; and it will be strange if our stock-farmers do not now make the most of their grass in its season, and buy from America for winter food; and if our farmers of all orders do not increase their live-stock under this great resource, so as to augment our supply of animal food, till every household in Great Britain has its daily dinner of meat.
Meantime, in our rural districts these things are only beginning to be known. We still hear the mower in the early morning, and give ourselves a holiday on haymaking days, though the machines come nearer to us every season.
We are wondering what will become of the complacency of the squire’s Norfolk labourer, Burkitt, when he is pushed aside by new-fangled ways of making the hay all in one day. He lords it over us all at that particular season, as he tries to do the whole year round. He thinks the Eastern Counties entitled to dictate to the rest of the kingdom in the matter of hay, as of turnips. According to him, it is the order of Nature that the smallest quantity of hay should occupy four days in the making in the best weather, and he has his rules for the disposition of it on each day; so that if we take our own way about any handful of it, he predicts ruin to the squire’s crop at the hands of his neighbours. When the squire himself gave little rakes to my children of five and seven years old, that they might “help” in the field, this consequential gentleman took them away: and, when desired to restore them to the crying children, declared that he washed his hands of the whole business. When the children are protected in making cocks and tumbling in them, he turns upon the lads and lasses whom he may venture to scold, and makes himself as detested as the King of Naples. His victims laugh, mimic him, and, when we gentry are near, defy him; but they hate him very cordially. His efforts to be polite to young ladies who come in and take up a rake are droll enough. On a hot day last June he entreated one group of them “not to muddle themselves.” Not being from the Eastern Counties, these young ladies supposed “muddle” to mean “fuddle,” and took his anxiety about their fatigues to be an admonition to keep their hands off the beer-cans. One way of pleasing him is to pick out the weeds from the rows; and he will no doubt tolerate even my little Harry if he sees him with a sheaf of oxeye daisies in his arms.
Well! we will not trouble poor Burkitt, nor ourselves either, in the hay-field with the progress of civilisation and the benefits of free trade, but go on working and playing among the grass as if haymaking were an immortal institution in England. But, whenever we see the business done by machinery, and follow the eddies of grass drying by perpetual motion, we shall perhaps observe that we certainly did always get a headache after half-an-hour’s work with the rake, and that perhaps Burkitt was not altogether wrong in considering our help worth very little, and our presence among the workers rather a nuisance.
There is one other busy day in the month, and that is Quarter-Day. In towns, and some prosperous rural districts, it is simply a day of what Burkitt would call “muddle”—a day of fatigue, heat, and dust, in removing to a new dwelling. We see carts pass, piled up with tables and chairs and bedding, and women and children carrying light weights of domestic utensils and ornaments. We see how heated and worried they look, and remark that even that is better than removing in the short days, and through the snow and mud of Christmas. But there are parts of the country where quarter-day means more than this, where sales of furniture abound when removals are going on. In those primitive districts people are not apt to be very prosperous, and they are apt to drink and get into debt when they are not prospering. To be “sold up” is the natural consequence, and sales are almost as much a matter of course as quarter-day. There is the auctioneer’s voice, and the tap of his hammer, as he stands on a table on the green, or under some spreading tree. There are the rows of housewives and gossips on benches, sometimes buying very bad bargains, and always held by enchantment the long day through. There are the gentry—young ladies and their brothers, or old gentlemen—stopping their horses as they ride past, to speak to some acquaintance, or to see how much some imaginative person will give for an article not worth anything. There are the trays, handed round, with little glasses of gin or rum, which are always emptied. There, finally, when the sale closes, are tipsy fellows, beginning to quarrel, and led apart by their wives, who have themselves had quite enough beer or worse. Everybody knows what will follow. In a few days a petition will be going round the place, asking subscriptions to set up