Then we talked about the farmers. They were very hard on the men. When harvest time came, that was the miserablest time of the year, for the big farmer goes round to the small farmers and tells them what he is going to pay, and then the men stand out, and are idle and walking about, while a lot of foreigners—that is, people from parts adjacent—come, who are bad workers and get drunk, and are very disagreeable to have anything to do with. There ought to be no large farmers who cannot properly attend to the farms, and who keep hunters and go out hunting. He would have no hunting at all, as it destroyed the crops to have a lot of men galloping over them. Farmers could not make their farms pay, as they did not keep enough men to pull up the weeds, and he had seen fields where the thistles were as high again as the barley, and instead of carting barley the farmer had to cart weeds, and that could not pay. Again, he thought it was madness to send the manure of towns into the sea when it was wanted on the land. Farmers were very unreasonable, and that was a pity. How could a farmer expect his men to work well if they were paid starvation wages? They even starved the horses. Many a farmer on a Sunday, or when the horses were idle, took off a feed of corn from the horses. Why, did not a farmer want his dinner on a Sunday when he was not working, and was it not the same with the horses? He had seen some farmers hunting, and their horses were nothing but bags of bone. ‘Well, what do you think of allotments of two or three acres?’ said I. Hodge evidently had a poor opinion of them. If he had one, he would not have the time nor the strength to work on it, though his wife might help him, as she was used to outdoor work; and then there was the ploughing, how could that be done? Could not, I asked, a farm be cut up into allotments, and one person make a living by ploughing for the others? No, he did not think that could be done, as you could never get a lot of people to be all of one mind in that respect. It was not much use giving an agricultural labourer more than forty rods to attend to. He did not keep bees, as his master did not like them, but his father-in-law did, and he made a good deal of money by them. One thing he did by which he made a little money, and that was to breed canaries. Once upon a time he caught a blackbird and took it home. Then he sold it for five shillings, and when his wife missed the bird he put a shilling to it and bought a canary. His master’s brother gave him another; and as they laid eggs and hatched them he sold canaries, and thus made a little.