A dozen years ago some people were talking to me here about the good old times, and their children meanwhile were giving the donkey and the dog some bits of bread. I said, “These are the good old times, and people will look back on them and say, in those days dogs and donkeys might eat wheaten bread.” I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,” although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat. Though wheat is so esteemed, a vast amount is wasted here in reaping and in threshing and with rats in ricks and barns. I have seen the ears gathered by hand in Turkey and in Spain, and with astonishing speed; and nothing is wasted then. And there is, I believe, an American machine which cuts the stalks so high that it reaps hardly anything below the ears; but I imagine that it does not get the ears off any of the shorter stalks. After living in Long Island (New York) in 1817 and 1818, Cobbett says in his _Cottage Economy_, section 82, “Few people upon the face of the earth live better than the Long Islanders, yet nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten bread. Rye is the flour that they principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very good bread. Half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, make bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my lifetime.” Of course the Americans also had what they call ‘corn’ and we call ‘maize.’ We grow this for fodder, as it seldom ripens here; and we import the product as cornflour. Cobbett tried the American sort here, but found another sort near Calais--a dwarf plant--and tried this in 1827 and the following years; and in 1828 he reckoned that he had eleven thousand quartern loaves upon eleven acres, though three of the eleven had failed. These experiments of his were made at Kensington and Barnes; and in 1828 he says in _Cobbett’s Corn_, section 155, that he was paying his men three shillings a-week with board and lodging. They had porridge for breakfast: as much hot mutton as they could eat for dinner, and also apple-dumplings: bread and cheese, as much as they could eat, for supper: a pint of beer at dinner and another pint at supper. He lived on the same diet himself.