Some day, let us hope, a wee body will appear upon his hearth—his own offspring, to be loved, nourished, and instructed; and then probably there will come another and another till a considerable family is grouped around him. The care and training of these children will be a kind of education to himself. The nursing of them will not fail to develop the womanliness of the wife. Let us hope that she may have much of a mother’s happiness and little of a mother’s sorrow, and that rosy health will be ever upon her hearth! May her boys grow up broad-shouldered and manly; may her girls be handsome, modest, and fair; and some day or other, a quarter of a century hence, may there be another moorland wedding, when those of us who have assisted at the present one, fiddler and dancers, writer and readers, shall be wearing away or perhaps gathered to ‘the land o’ the leal.’
EGG-CULTURE.
Why do we import seven or eight hundred million eggs every year, and pay two millions and a half sterling for them? The answer is, that the demand for eggs is steadily increasing, while the home produce is either lessening or stationary in amount.
Why the home supply does not advance with the increase of demand, is a question that calls for a little attention to the commercial aspects of farming. So many small holdings have been absorbed by large farms, that many a cottage housewife has been withdrawn from rural life who would otherwise have reared cottage poultry; neither the allotment-holder nor the artisan has range and space enough for rearing eggs to advantage.
In a trade journal called The Grocer, in which much information concerning the provision trades is given, the following remarks occur: ‘If a due attention to details were given in this country, the stock of fowls which roam about the farmyard and gather corn from the thrashing, instead of being a mere adjunct and perquisite of the servants, would return sufficient to discharge the rental of many a small holding. Such, we have understood, has been the case where the experiment has been fairly tried; and once this becomes an established notion, our own supplies will increase in a greater ratio than they do at present. According to a competent authority, at this time—what with improved native and imported varieties—we possess the best stock of egg-layers in the world. In no country is the management of our best poultry-yards excelled. These should serve as a model for the rest; to bring up the wholesale results to their true national importance, all we require is an extension of the taste for poultry-farming amongst those who earn their living on the land.’
The real new-laid eggs of home produce are comparatively few. Their excellence is best appreciated by obtaining them at country farmhouses. The small farmers who do not take nor send their eggs to open market sell them to country shopkeepers, or barter them for other commodities. Many cottagers contrive to keep a few fowls; and where there is no pig, these fowls act as scavengers, consuming the scraps of the family, the outside cabbage-leaves, peelings of boiled potatoes, &c.; if the fowls are supplied with a little corn, they will lay a good many eggs. This desultory mode of leaving poultry to find their food as best they may is, however, quite a mistake, and can never be adequately remunerative. Fowls, to pay, must be well looked after, and systematically fed and housed.
Ireland used to supply England with a considerable number of eggs, and perhaps may continue so to do; but statistical details of the trade between the two portions of the United Kingdom are not now published. About thirty years ago, fifty million eggs were annually shipped from Dublin alone to London and Liverpool, value about a hundred and twenty thousand pounds; the supply obtained from all Ireland very much exceeded this amount. Mr Weld, in his description of Roscommon about that period, noticed some of the features of the egg-trade in the rural districts of Ireland: ‘The eggs are collected from the cottages for several miles round by runners, boys nine years old and upwards, each of whom has a regular beat which he goes over daily, bearing back the produce of his toil carefully stored in a small hand-basket. I have frequently met with these boys on their rounds; and the caution necessary for bringing their brittle ware with safety seemed to have communicated an air of business and steadiness to their manner unusual to the ordinary volatile habits of children in Ireland.’
But as we have said, a large supply from abroad has become a necessity; and the characteristics of this supply are worth knowing; because they shew that the trade can be conducted profitably without having recourse to artificial incubation or hatching—a system which has at times had many advocates in England.
The importation of French eggs into this country has increased in an almost incredible degree, owing in part to the facilities afforded by the commercial treaty between England and France. It has risen from about a hundred and fifty million to six or seven hundred million eggs annually, since the year 1860; while the value per thousand has also increased, until at length our importers pay at least two millions and a half sterling for the yearly import. The eggs are brought over chiefly in steamers, and landed at Southampton, Folkestone, Arundel, Newhaven, and Shoreham.