rate for the village school, which educates the labourers' children. April arrives; grass grows rapidly. May comes; grass is now long. But still not one farthing has been made out of that twenty acres. Five months have passed, and all this time the shafts in the manufactories have been turning, and the quick coppers accumulating. Now it is June, and the mower goes to work; then the haymakers, and in a fortnight if the weather be good, a month if it be bad, the hay is ricked. Say it cost L1 per acre to make the hay and rick it--_i.e._, L20--and by this time half the rent is due, or L27 10s. = total expenditure (without any profit as yet), L47 10s., exclusive of stone-picking, ditch-cleaning, value of manure, etc. This by the way. The five months' idleness is the point at present. June is now gone. If the weather be showery the sharp-edged grass may spring up in a fortnight to a respectable height; but if it be a dry summer--and if it is not a dry summer the increased cost of haymaking runs away with profit--then it may be fully a month before there is anything worth biting. Say at the end of July (one more idle month) twenty cows are turned in, and three horses. One cannot estimate how long they may take to eat up the short grass, but certain it is that the beginning of November will see that field empty of cattle again; and fortunate indeed the agriculturist who long before that has not had to 'fodder' (feed with hay) at least once a day. Here, then, are five idle months in spring, one in summer, two in winter; total, eight idle months. But, not to stretch the case, let us allow that during a part of that time, though the meadow is idle, its produce--the hay--is being eaten and converted into milk, cheese and butter, or meat, which is quite correct; but, even making this allowance, it may safely be said that the meadow is absolutely idle for one-third of the year, or four months. That is looking at the matter in a mere pounds, shillings, and pence light. Now look at it in a broader, more national view. Does it not seem a very serious matter that so large a piece of land should remain idle for that length of time? It is a reproach to science that no method of utilizing the meadow during that eight months has been discovered. To go further, it is very hard to require of the agriculturist that he should keep pace with a world whose maxims day by day tend to centralize and concentrate themselves into the one canon, Time is Money, when he cannot by any ingenuity get his machinery to revolve more than once a year. In the old days the farmer belonged to a distinct class, a very isolated and independent class, little affected by the progress or retrogression of any other class, and not at all by those waves of social change which sweep over Europe. Now the farmer is in the same position as other producers: the fall or rise of prices, the competition of foreign lands, the waves of panic or monetary tightness, all tell upon him