n
Water, and his sense of the fitting being outraged, he interviewed the
owner, and, by an offer to pay the trifling difference between machine
and hand labour, induced him to discontinue the annoyance.

As to the relative cost of machine and hand wheat-cutting, quite early
in my farming I obtained the opinion of a distinguished farmer, then
well known on the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society, Mr.
Charles Randell, of Chadbury, near Evesham, on the subject: "If you
can get a good crop," he said, "cut, tied, and stocked by hand at
anything like 15s. an acre, don't use a machine. If the corn is ripe
it knocks out and wastes quite a bushel of wheat per acre" (worth at
that time about 5s., now nearer 9s. or 10s.). "I always bring out my
machines, and have them oiled and made ready, _but I don't want to use
them_."

In a wet harvest the machine is unworkable on sticky clay soil, and
after a wet summer, when the corn is badly laid and twisted, it makes
very poor work, cutting off the ears and scattering them, and leaving
a quantity of uncut and untidy straw on the ground.

In my own case my equanimity was never disturbed by a reaping machine,
with its unwieldy tossing arms, on my land, for I had to find
employment for my full staff of regular hands, specially required for
the much more important hop-picking a little later, and it pleased me
that they should get the extra pay for harvest work as well.

The cream separator, I admit, is a wonderful invention, and its hum is
not unmusical; it provides fresh skim milk for the calves and pigs
morning and night, which, as well as the cream, is thoroughly cleansed
in the process. The aeration of the skim milk leaves it a most
wholesome and nourishing article of diet for the villagers if they
could be made to understand its value, and that the removal of the
cream takes away only the fat (heating material), leaving the bone and
muscle making constituents in the milk. I could never induce my
village folk to accept this rudimentary proposition; they fancied that
all the goodness was gone with the cream, and though I offered the
skim milk at the nominal price of one halfpenny a quart, very few
would send their children to fetch it, though they mostly lived within
a hundred yards of the dairy.

The hay or straw elevator is one of the greatest helps, saving much
heavy overhand labour in rick-building. An old labourer, pointing to
one, with great appreciation, on a farm I was v