Of course there was plenty of hoeing waiting to be done, there always is; I never knew a soil so chock-full of weed-seeds as ours seems to be, and I never knew a place where folks are so little worried by them. Where things grow as easily as they do about our hills and valleys (and where the angle of the garden is just what ours is), you will find that the native reduces land-labour to the minimum, and nothing is disturbed unless absolutely necessary. Reasonably, if you have left the hoe at the top of the garden, and the top is a hundred feet above the bottom of the garden where you are standing, you think twice before you climb up and fetch it. As one result of this universal conservation of energy, our local nettle crop is one of the finest in the kingdom, I verily believe. “Why are those things left standing in every field corner?” I asked a farmer on one occasion, pointing to the usual grey-green waving jungle of weeds. “They nettles?” he questioned, in surprise; “well, what’s the good of wasting attention on ’em? They don’t hurt no one!” Incidentally I may say it is always well to criticize the methods employed on other people’s land rather than those practised on your own, since most right-minded employés resent any implication, no matter how politely you wrap it up, that improvement is possible; and if you question the why and wherefore of anything, it may be mistaken for fault-finding in this imaginative age. Hence, unless the handy man chances to be one of exceptional make up, I go farther afield when gleaning information. One day I watched a man very leisurely inspecting a thistle in a meadow by the weir, and then, with a deliberation that was most restful to a harried, hustled, war-time Londoner, he tenderly and carefully cut it off near the ground with a scythe. After he had decapitated about twenty thistles in this way, he naturally needed a little time for recuperation, and sat down on the river bank to meditate. I hadn’t liked to interrupt him when he was working, because so far as I could roughly estimate, there were thirteen thousand four hundred and fifty-three thistles in the meadow—approximately, you understand—and we don’t work according to trade union hours here; sometimes we start an hour later and leave off an hour earlier, and miss out several in between. But since he had evidently reached his rest-hour—and remembering that one of my own fields was plentifully dotted with thistles at the moment, and feeling quite equal myself to that gentle picturesque swish of the scythe—I asked him whether that process killed the thistle right out? (My business instinct forbade my wasting time on the job if it would all have to be done over again later on.) No, he said, he didn’t think as how it would kill the thistles right out. Then why did he do it that way? I asked, instead of spudding the thing right up by the root?