I suppose people who feel put out because we won’t believe that the greatest part of creation is going to the bad can never in the nature of things get hold of the true holiday feeling, so one is wasting time in wishing it for them. However, I am getting into quite another line from the one I meant to travel in; so shall leave speculating and push across the Channel. There are several questions which might be suggested with advantage to the Civil Service Examiner, to be put to the next Belgium attachés who come before them. Why are Belgian hop-poles, on an average, five or six feet longer than English? How does this extra length affect the crops? The Belgians plant cabbages too, and other vegetables (even potatoes I saw) between the rows of hops. Does it answer? All the English hop-growers, I believe, scout the idea. I failed to discover what wood their hop-poles are? One of my fellow-travellers, by way of being up to everything, Informed me that they were grown in Belgium on purpose; a fact which did not help me much. He couldn’t say exactly what wood it was. Then a very large proportion of the female population of Belgium spends many hours of the day, at this time of year, on its knees in the fields; and this not only for weeding purposes, for I saw women and girls cutting the aftermath and other light crops in this position. Certainly, they are thus nearer their work, and save themselves stooping; but one has a sort of prejudice against women going about the country on all fours, like Nebuchadnezzar. Is it better for their health? Don’t they get housemaid’s knees? But, above all, is it we or the Belgians who don’t, know in this nineteenth century, how to make corn shocks? In every part of England I have ever been in in harvest time, we just make up the sheaves and then simply stand six or eight of them together, the ears upwards, and so make our shock. But the Belgian makes his shock of four sheaves, ears upwards, and then on the top of these places another sheaf upside down. This crowning sheaf, which is tied near the bottom, is spread out over the shock, to which it thus forms a sort of makeshift thatch. One of the two methods must be radically wrong. Does this really keep the rain out, and so prevent the ears from growing in damp weather? I should have thought it would only have helped to hold the wet and increase the heat. If so, don’t you think it is really almost a _casus belli?_ Quin said to the elderly gentleman in the coffee-house (after he had handed him the mustard for the third time in vain), dashing his hand down on the table, “D------ you, sir, you shall eat mustard with your ham!” and so we might say to the Belgians if they are wrong, “You shall make your shocks properly.” Fancy two highly civilised nations having gone on these thousand years side by side, growing corn and eating bread without finding out which is the right way to make corn shocks. Bonn, 22nd August 1862.