measure, notwithstanding it did not appear likely that the country would be immediately affected by it, as there was no probability of the price of wheat being much below eighty shillings a quarter during that season. At this period I was fully occupied in a most laborious and uprofitable speculation. I had taken a farm of nearly four hundred acres. This farm had been occupied by a Major Andrews, a retired militia officer, who had commenced farmer, a business of which he was totally ignorant, and in the pursuit of which he sunk a good fortune; yet when he quitted this farm, or rather when his property and stock were seized and sold under an execution, perhaps the county of Hants could not have produced its equal for foulness and bad condition. I had occupied three thousand acres of land in Wiltshire, and I will venture to say, that there was not half the quantity of couch grass upon the whole of it that I now found upon the cleanest acre on Cold Henly Farm. Couch grass is the most injurious of all weeds, and, in some parts of Wiltshire, it is very appropriately called "the farmer's devil." This farm of Cold Henly was about seven miles from my residence at Middleton Cottage, and therefore I had ample exercise in riding to and fro, and attending all day to the cleaning of the land. The proprietor of the farm was a clergyman, and, as he professed to be very friendly with me, and gave me to understand that he should be happy to continue me as a tenant after my lease was out, I spared neither pains nor expense in cultivating the land, in hopes of hereafter reaping a reward for my labour. In fact, it was absolutely necessary to have the soil perfectly clean and free from all sorts of weeds and grass, to be enabled to cultivate it upon the drill system, as laid down by Tull. I believe that in the course of the first summer I burned forty thousand cart loads of couch, which made as many bushels of ashes for manure. Almost all the land required to be ploughed five or six times, by means of which, and of innumerable draggings and harrowings, and incessant and persevering labour, the farm became, in my hands, altogether as _clean_ as it was _foul_ and overrun with every description of weeds and grass, before I came to it. I was induced to expend a large sum of money in improving this farm, from the promises of the cunning, artful, and deceitful old clergyman, who was the proprietor of it. The buildings, which were very extensive, and miserably dilapidated, I put into complete repair; and, perhaps, altogether I expended on the land and offices three times as much as a common rack-renting farmer would have done. Being fully satisfied that I was greatly benefiting his estate, the parson not only gave his consent to any alteration that I thought proper in the course of husbandry, which the old tenant was bound in his lease to pursue, but he took all occasions to encourage me to do so; and, as my proceedings were so