During the conversation at the table, a farmer exhibited a head of the Hallett wheat, which he had grown on his land. I never saw anything to equal it, in any country in which I have travelled. It was nearly six inches in length, and seeded large and plump from top to bottom. This is a variety produced by Mr. Hallett, of Brighton, and is creating no little interest among English grain-growers. Lord Burghley, who had tested its properties, thus describes it, in a speech before the Northamptonshire Agricultural Society last summer:—
“At the Battersea Show last year, my attention was called to some enormous ears of wheat, which I thought could not have been grown in England. For, although the British farmer can grow corn with anyone, I had never seen such wheat here, and thought it must be foreign wheat. I went to the person who was threshing some out, and having been informed that it was sown only with one seed in a hole, I procured some of Mr. Hallett, of Brighton; and, being anxious to try the system, I planted it according to Mr. Hallett’s directions—one grain in a hole, the holes nine and a half inches apart, with six inches between the rows. To satisfy myself on the subject, I also planted some according to Stephen’s instructions, who said three grains in a hole would produce the most profitable return. I also planted some two grains in a hole. I sowed the grain at the end of last September, on bad land, over an old quarry, and except some stiff clay at the bottom of it, there was nothing in it good for wheat. The other day I counted the stalks of all three. On Mr. Stephen’s plan of three grains in a hole, there were eighteen stalks; with two grains in a hole, there was about the same number; but with one seed in a hole, the lowest number of stalks was sixteen, and the highest twenty-two. I planted only about half an acre as a trial, and when I left home a few days since, it looked as much like eight quarters (sixty-four bushels) to the acre as any I have seen. The ears are something enormous. I would certainly recommend every farmer to make his own experiments, for if it succeeds, it will prove a great economy of seed; and drills to distribute it fairly are to be had.”
Truly one of Hallett’s wheat ears might displace the old cornucopia in that picture of happy abundance so familiar to old and young. Here are twenty ears from one seed, containing probably a thousand grains. The increase of a thousand-fold, or half that ratio, is prodigious, having nothing to equal it in the vegetable world that we know of. If one bushel of seed wheat could be so distributed by a drill as to produce 500 or 250 bushels at the harvest, certainly the staff of life would be greatly cheapened to the millions who lean upon it alone for subsistence.
From Oundle I walked the next day to Stamford, a good, solid, old English town, sitting on the corners of three counties, and on three layers of history, Saxon, Dane and Norman. The first object of interest was a stone bridge over the Nen at Oundle. It is a grand structure to span such a little river. It must have cost three times as much as “The Great Bridge” over the Connecticut at Hartford; and yet the stream it crosses is a mere rivulet compared with our New England river. “The bridge with wooden piers” is a fabric of fancy to most English people. They have read of such a thing in Longfellow’s poems, but hardly realise that it exists still in civilised countries. Here bridges are works of art as well as of utility, and rank next to the grand old cathedrals and parish churches for solidity and symmetry. Their stone arches are frequently turned with a grace as fine as any in St. Paul’s, and their balustrades and butments often approach the domain of sculpture.
Crossing the Nen, I followed it for several miles in a northerly direction. I soon came to a rather low, level section of the road, and noticed stones placed at the side of it, at narrow intervals, for a long distance to the very foot of a village situated on a rising ground. These stones were evidently taken from some ancient edifice, for many of them bore the marks of the old cathedral or castle chisel. They were the foot-tracks of a ruined monument of dark and painful history. More than this might be said of them. They were the blood-drops of a monstrosity chased from its den and hunted down by the people, who shuddered with horror at its sanguinary record of violence and wrong. As I approached the quiet village, whose pleasant-faced houses, great and small, looked like a congregation of old and young sitting reverently around the parish church and listening to the preaching of the belfry, I saw where these stones came from. There, on that green, ridgy slope, where the lambs lay in the sun by the river, these stones, and a million more scattered hither and thither, once stood in walls high, hideous and wrathful, for half a dozen centuries and more. If the breathings of human woe, if the midnight misery of wretched, broken hearts, could have penetrated these stones, one might almost fancy that they would have sweat with human histories in the ditch where they lay, and discolored the puddles they bridged with the bitter distilment of grief centuries old. On that gentle rising from the little Nen stood Fotheringay Castle. That central depression among the soft-carpeted ridges marks the site of the donjon huge and horrid, where many a knight and lady of noble blood was pinioned or penned in darkness and hopeless duress centuries before the unfortunate Mary was born. There nearly half the sad years of her young life and beauty were prisoned. There she pined in the sickness of hope deferred, in the corroding anguish of dread uncertainty, for a space as wide as that between the baptismal font and presentation at Elizabeth’s court. There she laid her white neck upon the block. There fell the broad axe of Elizabeth’s envy, fear and hate. There fell the fair-haired head that once gilded a crown and wore all the glory of regal courts—still beautiful in the setting light of farewell thoughts.
It may be truly said of Fotheringay Castle, that not one stone is left upon another to mark its foundations. Not Fleet-street Prison, nor the Bastille itself, went out under a heavier weight of popular odium. Although public sentiment, as well as the personal taste and interest of their proprietors, has favored the preservation of the ruins of old castles and abbeys in Great Britain, Fotheringay bore, branded deep in its forehead, the mark of Cain, and every man’s hand, of the last generation, seemed to have been turned against it. It has not only been demolished, but the debris have been scattered far and wide, and devoted to uses which they scarcely honor. You will see the well-faced stones for miles around, in garden walls, pavements, cottage hearths and chimneys, in stables and cow-houses. In Oundle, the principal hotel, a large castellated building, shows its whole front built of them.
The great lion of Stamford is the Burghley House, the palace of the Marquis of Exeter. It may be called so without exaggeration of its magnificence as a building or of the extent and grandeur of its surroundings. The edifice itself would cut up into nearly half a dozen “White Houses,” such as we install our American Presidents in at Washington. Certainly, in any point of view, it is large and splendid enough for the residence of an emperor and his suite. Its towers, turrets and spires present a picturesque grove of architecture of different ages, and its windows, it is said, equal in number all the days of the year. It was not open to the public the day I was in Stamford, so I could only walk around it and estimate its interior by its external grandeur.
But there was an outside world of architecture in the park of sublimer features to me than even the great palace itself, with all its ornate and elaborate sculpture. It was the architecture of the majestic elms and oaks that stood in long ranks and folded their hands, high up in the blue sky, above the finely-gravelled walks that radiated outward in different directions. They all wore the angles and arches of the Gothic order and the imperial belt of several centuries. I walked down one long avenue and counted them on either side. There were not sixty on both; yet their green and graceful roofage reached a full third of a mile. Not sixty to pillar and turn such an arch as that! I sat down on a seat at the end to think of it. There was a morning service going on in this Cathedral of Nature. The dew-moistened, foliated arches so lofty, so interwebbed with wavy, waky spangles of sky, were all set to the music of the anthem. “The street musicians of the heavenly city” were singing one of its happiest hymns out of their mellow throats. The long and lofty orchestra was full of them. Their twittering treble shook the leaves with its breath, as it filtered down and flooded the temple below. Beautiful is this building of God! Beautiful and blessed are these morning singing-birds of His praise! Amen!
But do not go yet. No; I will not. Here is the only book I carry with me on this walk—a Hebrew Psalter, stowed away in my knapsack. I will open it here and now, and the first words my eye lights upon shall be a text for a few thoughts on this scene and scenery. And here they are,—seemingly not apposite to this line of reflection, yet running parallel to it very closely:
[HEBREW PHRASE]