A little while before I came to this farm-yard, I saw, in one piece, about four hundred acres of wheat-stubble, and I saw a sheep-fold, which, I thought, contained an acre of ground, and had in it about four thousand sheep and lambs. The fold was divided into three separate flocks; but the piece of ground was one and the same; and I thought it contained about an acre. At one farm, between Pewsey and Upavon, I counted more than 300 hogs in one stubble. This is certainly the most delightful farming in the world. No ditches, no water-furrows, no drains, hardly any hedges, no dirt and mire, even in the wettest seasons of the year: and though the downs are naked and cold, the valleys are snugness itself. They are, as to the downs, what _ah-ahs!_ are, in parks or lawns. When you are going over the downs, you look _over_ the valleys, as in the case of the _ah-ah_; and if you be not acquainted with the country, your surprise, when you come to the edge of the hill, is very great. The shelter, in these valleys, and particularly where the downs are steep and lofty on the sides, is very complete. Then, the trees are everywhere lofty. They are generally elms, with some ashes, which delight in the soil that they find here. There are, almost always, two or three large clumps of trees in every parish, and a rookery or two (not _rag_-rookery) to every parish. By the water's edge there are willows; and to almost every farm there is a fine orchard, the trees being, in general, very fine, and, this year, they are, in general, well loaded with fruit. So that, all taken together, it seems impossible to find a more beautiful and pleasant country than this, or to imagine any life more easy and happy than men might here lead, if they were untormented by an accursed system that takes the food from those that raise it, and gives it to those that do nothing that is useful to man. Here the farmer has always an abundance of straw. His farm-yard is never without it. Cattle and horses are bedded up to their eyes. The yards are put close under the shelter of a hill, or are protected by lofty and thick-set trees. Every animal seems comfortably situated; and, in the dreariest days of winter, these are, perhaps, the happiest scenes in the world; or, rather, they would be such, if those, whose labour makes it all, trees, corn, sheep and everything, had but _their fair share_ of the produce of that labour. What share they really have of it one cannot exactly say; but, I should suppose, that every labouring _man_ in this valley raises as much food as would suffice for fifty, or a hundred persons, fed like himself!