The settlement of Mr. Trant Drury in their immediate neighbourhood had not proved such a source of satisfaction as had been hoped for. Those dictatorial and hurrying qualities in his character, which farmer Barrowclouch had noticed, soon began to press themselves unpleasantly on most of those around him. That he was a first-rate agriculturist of a particular school there could be no question; but it was a school essentially different from that which prevailed in all that part of the country. It was a country naturally fertile, varied in its features, and rendered extremely pleasant by the fine and free-grown fences, the scattered hedge-row trees, and patches of wood. With all these, Mr. Drury made war to the knife—no, to the hatchet and the saw. He expressed his great surprise that any agriculturists could yet be found who would sacrifice so much of their valuable land to the mere growth of useless bushes and almost worthless hedge-row trees. As to the woods and plantations, they might remain, and be made profitable by liberal thinning; but as for the hedges, he would have them all pared down to the shortest state possible to be fences at all, and the hedge-row trees, he would cut down every one of them. He would leave only here and there on the land a spreading tree for shelter for the cattle from the sun in summer; but as for hedges, they were useful only as a means of separating fields, and these he would cut to the quick, and narrow as much as possible; nay, he would cut down half of the hedges altogether, and leave the fields—especially the tillage fields—four of five times their present size. He calculated that nearly a tenth of the superficies of the country might be thus brought into profitable culture. As for the hedge-row trees, he said they were so frequently lopped on their trunks as they grew, to prevent their spreading too widely, that as timber they were a congeries of knots, and of no use but for firewood. In fact, he would have reduced the whole country to a condition as bare as the back of your hand; for beauty or the picturesque had no organ in his brain,—their place was engrossed by the organ of profit.