A Walk from London to John O'Groat's / With Notes by the Way

by Elihu Burritt

On passing through the stables and housings for stock, I noticed a simple, yet ingenious contrivance for watering cattle, which I am not sure I can describe accurately enough, without a drawing, to convey a tangible idea of it to my agricultural neighbors in America. It may be called the buoy-cock. In the first place, the water is brought into a cistern placed at one end of the stable or shed at a sufficient elevation to give it the necessary fall in all the directions in which it is to be conducted. The pipe used for each cow-box or manger connects each with the cistern, and the distributing end of it rests upon, or is suspended over, the trough assigned to each animal. About one-third of this trough, which was here a cast-iron box, about twelve inches deep and wide, protrudes through the boarding of the stable. In this outside compartment is placed a hollow copper ball attached to a lever, which turns the axle or pivot of the cock. Now, this little buoy, of course, rises and falls with the water in the trough. When the trough is full, the buoy rises and raises the lever so as to shut off the water entirely. At every sip the animal takes, the buoy descends and lets on again, to a drop, a quantity equal to that abstracted from the inside compartment. Thus the trough is always kept full of pure water, without losing a drop of it through a waste-pipe or overflow. Where a great herd of cattle and a drove of horses have to be supplied from a deep well, as in the case of Mr. Jonas, at Chrishall Grange, this buoy-cock must save a great amount of labor.

I saw also here in perfection that garden allotment system which is now coming widely into vogue in England, not only adjoining large towns like Birmingham, but around small villages in the rural districts. It is well worthy of being introduced in New England and other states, where it would work equally well in various lines of influence. A landowner divides up a field into allotments, each generally containing a rood, and lets them to the mechanics, tradespeople and agricultural laborers of the town or village, who have no gardens of their own for the growth of vegetables. Each of these is better than a savings-bank to the occupant. He not only deposits his odd pennies but his odd hours in it; keeping both away from the public-house or from places and habits of idleness and dissipation. The days of Spring and Summer here are very long, and a man can see to work in the field as early as three o’clock in the morning, and as late as nine at night. So every journeyman blacksmith, baker or shoemaker may easily find four or five hours in the twenty-four for work on his allotment, after having completed the task or time due to his employer. He generally keeps a pig, and is on the qui vive to make and collect all the manure he can for his little farm. A field of several acres, thus divided and cultivated in allotments, presents as striking a combination of colors as an Axminster carpet. As every rood is subdivided into a great variety of vegetables, and as forty or fifty of such patches, lying side by side, present, in one coup d’œil, all the alternations of which these crops and colors are susceptible, the effect is very picturesque.

My Woodhurst friend makes his allotment system a source of much social enjoyment to himself and the poor villagers. He lets forty-seven patches, each containing twenty poles. Every tenant pays 10s., or $2 40c., annual rent for his little holding, Mr. E. drawing the manure for each, which is always one good load a year. Here, too, these little spade-farmers are put under the same regime as the great tenant agriculturists of the country. Each must farm his allotment according to the terms of the yearly lease. He must dig up his land with spade or pick, not plough it; and he is not allowed to work on it upon the Sabbath. But encouragements greatly predominate over restrictions, and stimulate and reward a high cultivation. Eight prizes are offered to this end, of the following amounts:—10s., 7s. 6d., 5s., 4s., 3s., 2s. 6d., 2s. and 1s. Every one who competes must not have more than half his allotment in potatoes. The greater the variety of vegetables the other half contains, the better is his chance for the first prize. The appraiser is some disinterested person of good judgment, perhaps from an adjoining town, who knows none of the competitors. To prevent any possible favoritism, the allotments are all numbered, and he awards prizes to numbers only, not knowing to whom they belong. Another feature, illustrating the generous disposition of the proprietor, characterises this good work. On the evening appointed for paying the rents, he gets up a regular, old-fashioned English supper of roast beef and plum-pudding for them, giving each fourpence instead of beer, so that they may all go home sober as well as cheerful. To see him preside at that table, with his large, round, rosy face beaming upon them with the quiet benevolence of a good heart, and to hear the fatherly and neighborly talks he makes to them, would be a picture and preaching which might be commended to the farmers of all countries.

I saw also a curious phenomenon in the natural world on this farm, which perhaps will be regarded as a fiction of fancy by many a reader. It was a large field of barley grown from oats! We have recently dwelt upon some of the co-workings of Nature and Art in the development of flowers and of several useful plants. But here is something stranger still, that seems to diverge from the line of any law hitherto known in the vegetable world. Still, for aught one can know at this stage of its action, it may be the same general law of development which we have noticed, only carried forward to a more advanced point of progress. I would commend it to the deep and serious study of naturalists, botanists, or to those philosophers who should preside over the department of investigation to which the subject legitimately belongs. I will only say what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Here, I repeat, was a large field of heavy grain, ready for harvest. The head and berry were barley, and the stalk and leaves were oat! Here, certainly, is a mystery. The barley sown on this field was the first-born offspring of oats. And the whole process by which this wonderful transformation is wrought, is simply this, and nothing more:—The oats are sown about the last week in June; and, before coming into ear, they are cut down within one inch and a half of the ground. This operation is repeated a second time. They are then allowed to stand through the winter, and the following season the produce is barley. This is the plain statement of the case in the very words of the originator of this process, and of this strange transmutation. The only practical result of it which he claims is this: that the straw of the barley thus produced is stouter, and stands more erect, and, therefore, less liable to be beaten down by heavy wind or rain. Then, perhaps, it may be added, this oat straw headed with barley is more valuable as fodder for live stock than the natural barley straw. But the value of this result is nothing compared with the issue of the experiment as proving the existence of a principle or law hitherto undiscovered, which may be applied to all kinds of plants for the use of man and beast. If any English reader of these notes is disposed to inquire more fully into this subject, I am sure he may apply without hesitation to Mr. John Ekins, of Bruntisham, near St. Ives, who will supply any additional information needed. He presented me with a little sample bag of this oat-born barley, which I hope to show my agricultural neighbors on returning to America.

CHAPTER XI.

THE MILLER OF HOUGHTON—AN HOUR IN HUNTINGDON—OLD HOUSES—WHITEWASHED TAPESTRY AND WORKS OF ART—“THE OLD MERMAID” AND “THE GREEN MAN”—TALK WITH AGRICULTURAL LABORERS—THOUGHTS ON THEIR CONDITION, PROSPECTS, AND POSSIBILITIES.

After a little more than a week’s visit in St. Ives and neighboring villages, I again resumed my staff and set out in a westerly direction, in order to avoid the flat country which lay immediately northward for a hundred miles and more. Followed the north bank of the Ouse to Huntingdon. On the way, I stopped and dined with a gentleman in Houghton whose hospitality and good works are well known to many Americans. The locality mentioned is so identified with his name, that they will understand whom I mean. There was a good and tender-hearted man who lived in our Boston, called Deacon Grant; and I hope he is living still. He was so kind to everybody in trouble, and everybody in trouble went to him so spontaneously for sympathy and relief, that no one ever thought of him as belonging to a single religious congregation, but regarded him as Deacon of the whole of Boston—a kind of universal father, whose only children were the orphans and the poor men’s sons and daughters of the city. The Miller of Houghton, as some of my readers will know, is just such another man, with one slight difference, which is to his advantage, as a gift of grace. He has all of Deacon Grant’s self-diffusing life of love for his kind, generous and tender dispositions towards the poor and needy, and more than the Deacon’s means of doing good; and, with all this, the indomitable energy and will and even the look of Cromwell. During my stay in the neighborhood, I was present at two large gatherings at his House of Canvas, with which he supplements his family mansion when the latter lacks the capacity of his heart in the way of accommodation. This tent, which he erects on his lawn, will hold a large congregation; and, on both the occasions to which I refer, was well filled with men, women, and children from afar and near. The first was a re-union of the Sunday-school teachers and pupils of the county, to whom he gave a sumptuous dinner; after which followed addresses and some business transactions of the association. The second was the examination of the British School of the village, founded and supported, I believe, by himself. At the conclusion of the exercises, which were exceedingly interesting, the whole company, young and old, adjourned to the lawn, where the visitors and elder people of the place were served with tea and coffee under the tent.

Then came “The Children’s Hour.” They were called in from their games and romping on the lawn, and formed into a circle fifty feet in diameter. And here and now commenced an entertainment which would make a more interesting picture than the old Apsley House Dinner. The good deacon of the county, with several assistants, entered this charmed circle of boys and girls, all with eyes dilated and eager with expectation, and overlooked by a circular wall of elder people radiant with the spirit of the moment. The host, in his white hat and grey beard, led the way with a basket on his arm, filled with little cakes, called with us gingernuts. He was followed by a file of other men with baskets of nuts, apples, etc. It was a most hilarious scene, exhilarating to all the senses to look upon, either for young or old. He walked around the ring with a grand, Cromwellian step, sowing a pattering rain of the little cakes on the clean-shaven lawn, as a farmer would sow wheat in his field, broadcast, in liberal handfuls. Then followed in their order the nut-sowers, apple-sowers, and the sowers of other goodies. When the baskets were emptied, the circular space enclosed was covered with as tempting a spread of dainties as ever fascinated the eyes of a crowd of little people. For a whole minute, longer than a full hour of ordinary schoolboy enjoyments, they had to stand facing that sight, involuntarily attitudinising for the plunge. At the end of that long minute, the signal sounded, and, in an instant, there was a scene in the ring that would have made the soberest octogenarian shake his sides with the laughter of his youth. The encircling multitude of youngsters darted upon the thickly-scattered delicacies like a flock of birds upon a field of grain, with patter, twitter and flutter, and a tremor and treble of little short laughs; small, eager hands trying in vain to shut fast upon a large apple and several ginger-nuts at one grasp; slippings and trippings, tousling of tresses and crushing of dresses; boys and girls higgledy-piggledy; caps and bonnets piggledy-higgledy; little, red-faced Alexanders looking half sad, because they had filled their small pocket-worlds and both hands with apples and nuts, and had no room nor holding for more; little girls, with broken bonnet-strings, and long, sunny hair dancing over their eyes, stretching their short fingers to grasp another goodie,—all this, with the merry excitement of fathers and mothers, elder brothers and sisters, and other spectators, made it a scene of youthful life and delight which would test the genius of the best painters of the age to delineate. And Sir Roger Coverley Cromwell, the author of all this entertainment, would make a capital figure in the group, taken just as he looked at that moment, with his face illuminated with the upshooting joy of his heart, like the clear, frosty sky of winter with the glow and the flush of the Northern Lights.

The good Miller of Houghton, having added stone to stone until his mills can grind all the wheat the largest county can grow, has recently handed over to his sons the great business he had built up to such magnitude, and retired, if possible, to a more active life of benevolence. One of his late benefactions was a gift of £3,000, or nearly $15,000, toward the erection of an Independent Chapel in St. Ives.

At Huntingdon, I took tea and spent a pleasant hour with the principal of a select school, kept in a large, dignified and comfortable mansion, once occupied by the poet Cowper. In the yard behind the house there is a wide-spreading and prolific pear-tree planted by his hands. This, too, was one of the thousands of old, stately dwellings you meet with here and there, which have no beginning nor end that you can get at. Cowper lived and wrote in this, for instance; but who lived in it a century before he was born? Who built it? Which of the Two Roses did he mount on his arms? Or did he live and build later, and dine his townsman, the great Oliver, or was he loyal to the last to Charles the First? These are questions that come up, on going over such a building, but no one can answer them, and you are left to the wisdom of limping legends on the subject. The present occupant has an antiquarian penchant; so, a short time after he took possession of the house, he began to make explorations in the walls and wainscotings, as men of the same mind have done at Nineveh and Pompeii. Having penetrated a thick surface of white lava, or a layer of lime, put on with a brush “in an earlier age than ours,” he came upon a gorgeous wall of tapestry, with inwoven figures and histories of great men and women, quite as large as life, and all of very florid complexion and luxurious costumes. He has already exhumed a great many square yards of this picturesque fabric, wrought in by-gone ages, and is continuing the work with all the zest and success of a fortunate archæologist. Now it is altogether probable, that Cowper, as he sat in one of those rooms writing at his beautiful rhymes, had not the slightest idea that he was surrounded by such a crowd of kings, queens, and other great personages, barely concealed behind a thin cloud of white-wash.