expecting every hour to be released."

And the Lady Jane, who is washing off her fashionable humors in the
fashionable waters of Bath, writes,--"I have received, my beloved Sir
Humphry, the letter signed by your hand, with its precious wish of
tenderness. I start to-morrow, _having been detained here_ by Doctors
Babington and Clarke till to-day.... I cannot add more" (it is a letter
of half a page) "than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a
glory, your life still a hope."

Sweet Lady Jane! Yet they say she mourned him duly, and set a proper
headstone at his grave. But, for my own part, I have no faith in that
affection which will splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and
yet, when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with an idle swash
of tears.

* * * * *

There was a British farmer by the name of Morris Birkbeck, who about the
year 1814 wrote an account of an agricultural tour in France; and who
subsequently established himself somewhere upon our Western prairies, of
which he gave account in "Letters from Illinois," and in "Notes on a
Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of
Illinois," with maps, etc. Cobbett once or twice names him as "poor
Birkbeck,"--but whether in allusion to his having been drowned in one of
our Western rivers, or to the poverty of his agricultural successes, it
is hard to determine.

In 1820 Major-General Beatson, who had been Aid to the Marquis of
Wellesley in India, published an account of a new system of farming,
which he claimed to have in successful operation at his place in the
County of Sussex. The novelty of the system lay in the fact that he
abandoned both manures and the plough, and scarified the surface to the
depth of two or three inches, after which he burned it over. The
Major-General was called to the governorship of St. Helena before his
system had made much progress. I am led to allude to the plan as one of
the premonitory hints of that rotary method which is just now enlisting
a large degree of attention in the agricultural world, and which
promises to supplant the plough on all wide stretches of land, within
the present century.

Finlayson, a brawny Scot, born in the parish of Mauchline, who was known
from "Glentuck to the Rutton-Ley" as the best man for "putting the
stone," or for a "hop, step, and leap," contrived the self-cleaning
ploughs (with circular beam) and harrows which bore his