On returning from the Fens, I passed the night and most of the following day at Woodhurst, a village a few miles north of St. Ives, on the upland rising gently from the valley of the Ouse. My host here was a farmer, owning the land he tilled, cultivating it and the moral character and happiness of the little community, in which he moved as a father, with an equally generous heart and hand, and reaping a liberal reward from both departments of his labor. He took me over his fields, and showed me his crops and live stock, which were in excellent condition. Harvesting had already commenced, and the reapers were at work, men and women, cutting wheat and barley. Few of them used sickles, but a curved knife, wider than the sickle, of nearly the same shape, minus the teeth. A man generally uses two of them. With the one in his left hand he gathers in a good sweep of grain, bends it downward, and with the other strikes it close to the ground, as we cut Indian corn. With the left-hand hook and arm, he carries on the grain from the inside to the outside of the swath or "work," making three or four strokes with the cutting knife; then, at the end, gathers it all up and lays it down in a heap for binding. This operation is called "bagging." It does not do the work so neatly as the sickle, and is apt to pull up many stalks by the roots with the earth attaching to them, especially at the last, outside stroke. I was struck with the economy adopted by my host in loading, carting and stacking or ricking his grain. The operation was really performed like clock-work. Two or three men were stationed at the rick to unload the carts, two in the fields to load them, and several boys to lead them back and forth to the two parties. They were all one-horse carts, and so timed that a loaded one was always at the rick and an empty one always in the field; thus keeping the men at both ends fully employed from morning until night, pitching on and pitching off; while boys, at 6d. or 8d. a day, led the horses.