CHAPTER XVII.
CORN--WHEAT--RIDGE AND FURROW--BARLEY--FARMERS NEWSTYLE AND OLDSTYLE.
"He led me thro' the short sweet-smelling lanes
Of his wheat-suburb, babbling as he went."
--_The Brook_.
I do not propose to enter upon the ordinary details of arable farming,
as not of very general interest, except for those actually engaged
thereon. I am aiming especially at the more unusual crops, and what I
may call the curiosities of agriculture. It is most interesting to
turn to Virgil's _Georgics_ and see how they apply after the lapse of
nearly twenty centuries to the farm-work of the present day. Horace,
too, was a farmer, though perhaps more of an amateur; he exclaims at
the busy scene presented when men and horses are engaged in active
field work:
"_Heu heu! quantus equis quantus adest viris Sudor!_"
which, by the way, was rendered with Victorian propriety by a
well-known Oxford professor, "What a quantity of perspiration!" etc.
Probably Horace had been watching the sowing of barley or oats on a
fine March morning, "the peck of March dust," which we know is "worth
a King's ransom," flying behind the harrows. George Cruikshank gives a
very spirited and comic realization of Horace's lines, in Hoskin's
_Talpa_, where ploughing, sowing, harrowing, reaping, harvesting,
thrashing, grinding and carting away the finished product, are all
actively proceeding in the same field.
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