before my lodge gates?"

"Please, sir--"

"Don't answer me. And did I tell you, or did I not, that the next time I
saw you making a drying-ground of my lilacs, you should go out, neck and
crop--"

"Oh, please, sir--"

"You leave my lodge next Saturday! drive on, boy. The ingratitude and
insolence of those common people are disgraceful to human nature,"
muttered Richard, with an accent of the bitterest misanthropy.

The chaise wheeled along the smoothest and freshest of gravel roads, and
through fields of the finest land, in the highest state of cultivation.
Rapid as was Leonard's survey, his rural eye detected the signs of a
master in the art agronomial. Hitherto he had considered the squire's
model farm as the nearest approach to good husbandry he had seen; for
Jackeymo's finer skill was developed rather on the minute scale of
market-gardening than what can fairly be called husbandry. But
the squire's farm was degraded by many old-fashioned notions, and
concessions to the whim of the eye, which would not be found in model
farms nowadays,--large tangled hedgerows, which, though they constitute
one of the beauties most picturesque in old England, make sad deductions
from produce; great trees, overshadowing the corn and harbouring the
birds; little patches of rough sward left to waste; and angles of
woodland running into fields, exposing them to rabbits and blocking out
the sun. These and such like blots on a gentleman-farmer's agriculture,
common-sense and Giacomo had made clear to the acute comprehension of
Leonard. No such faults were perceptible in Richard Avenel's domain. The
fields lay in broad divisions, the hedges were clipped and narrowed
into their proper destination of mere boundaries. Not a blade of wheat
withered under the cold shade of a tree; not a yard of land lay waste;
not a weed was to be seen, not a thistle to waft its baleful seed
through the air: some young plantations were placed, not where the
artist would put them, but just where the farmer wanted a fence from
the wind. Was there no beauty in this? Yes, there was beauty of its
kind,--beauty at once recognizable to the initiated, beauty of use
and profit, beauty that could bear a monstrous high rent. And Leonard
uttered a cry of admiration which thrilled through the heart of Richard
Avenel.

"This IS farming!" said the villager.

"Well, I guess it is," answered Richard, all his ill-humour vanishing.
"You should have seen the land when I bo