e cuff of the neck till he lies down on his back and rots
in the rain--in autumn, by the ears, and rubs him against the grain till
he expires as fushionless as the windle-straes with which he is
interlaced--in winter, she shakes him in the stook till he is left but a
shadow which pigeons despise. See him in stack at Christmas, and you
pity the poor straw. Here and there bits of bear or big, and barley, she
permits to flourish--nor is she loth to see the flowers and shaws and
apples on the poor man's plant, the life-sustaining potato--which none
but political economists hate and all Christians love. She is not so
sure about turnips, but as they are a green crop she leaves them to the
care of the fly. But where have her gowans gone? There they still are in
flocks, which no cultivation can scatter or eradicate--inextinguishable
by all the lime that was ever brought unslokened from all the kilns that
ever glowed--by all the dung that was ever heaped up fresh and fuming
from all the Augean stables in the land. Yet her heart burns within her
to behold, even in the midst of what she abhors, the large dew-loved
heads of clover whitening or reddening, or with their rival colours
amicably intermingled, a new birth glorious in the place of reedy marish
or fen where the catspaws nodded--and them she will retain unto herself
when once more she shall rejoice in her Wilderness Restored.

And would we be so barbarous as to seek to impede the progress of
improvement, and to render agriculture a dead letter? We are not so
barbarous, nor yet so savage. We love civilised life, of which we have
long been one of the smaller but sincerest ornaments. But agriculture,
like education, has its bounds. It is, like it, a science, and woe to
the country that encourages all kinds of quacks. Cultivate a moor!
educate a boor! First understand the character of Clods and Clodhoppers.
To say nothing now of the Urbans and Suburbans--a perilous people--yet
of great capabilities; for to discuss that question would lead us into
lanes; and as it is a long lane that has never a turning, for the
present we keep in the open air, and abstain from wynds. We are no
enemies to poor soils, far less to rich ones ignorantly and stupidly
called poor, which under proper treatment effuse riches; but to expect
to extract from paupers _a return_ for the expenditure squandered by
miserly greed on their reluctant bottoms, cold and bare, is the insanity
of speculation, and such