ood in that dry and burning summer.
I myself came off better than most: I had about the fourth of a crop of
pease.

It will be recollected, that, in a manner, all the bacon and pork
consumed in this country (the far largest consumption of meat out of
towns) is, when growing, fed on grass, and on whey or skimmed milk,--and
when fatting, partly on the latter. This is the case in the dairy
countries, all of them great breeders and feeders of swine; but for the
much greater part, and in all the corn countries, they are fattened on
beans, barley-meal, and pease. When the food of the animal is scarce,
his flesh must be dear. This, one would suppose, would require no great
penetration to discover.

This failure of so very large a supply of flesh in one species naturally
throws the whole demand of the consumer on the diminished supply of all
kinds of flesh, and, indeed, on all the matters of human sustenance.
Nor, in my opinion, are we to expect a greater cheapness in that article
for this year, even though corn should grow cheaper, as it is to be
hoped it will. The store swine, from the failure of subsistence last
year, are now at an extravagant price. Pigs, at our fairs, have sold
lately for fifty shillings, which two years ago would not have brought
more than twenty.

As to sheep, none, I thought, were strangers to the general failure of
the article of turnips last year: the early having been burned, as they
came up, by the great drought and heat; the late, and those of the early
which had escaped, were destroyed by the chilling frosts of the winter
and the wet and severe weather of the spring. In many places a full
fourth of the sheep or the lambs were lost; what remained of the lambs
were poor and ill fed, the ewes having had no milk. The calves came
late, and they were generally an article the want of which was as much
to be dreaded as any other. So that article of food, formerly so
abundant in the early part of the summer, particularly in London, and
which in a great part supplied the place of mutton for near two months,
did little less than totally fail.

All the productions of the earth link in with each other. All the
sources of plenty, in all and every article, were dried or frozen up.
The scarcity was not, as gentlemen seem to suppose, in wheat only.

Another cause, and that not of inconsiderable operation, tended to
produce a scarcity in flesh provision. It is one that on many accounts
cannot be too much regr