"Then straight a triple harvest rose, Or Paradise, manured and tilled by hands divine." Some subsoil ploughs were awaiting their letters dismissory to Cuba, to supply that deep culture which the sugar-cane needs. Australia and America patronise the triple, or "gang ploughs," upon which a man rides and steers. Peat, thirty inches beneath the alluvial soil of the fens, will not be proof against the gentle violence of those sturdy clunch ploughs, which look quite antediluvian by the side of their lithesome iron compatriots. Stacks of flexible and zig-zag harrows, with reversible tines for grass and arable lands, cultivators, horse and steam, and horse rakes for Russia and Austria, are all brigaded together; and the prize Leeds haymakers are a great host in their season. Russia, with no tariff to fetter her, is by far the best all-round customer. Fifteen per cent. stares each plough in the face as it enters a French port, and the treaty did not touch it, subject to a moderate duty, which is reduced one-half on application to the Government. Tillage implements and Lincolnshire steam-engines and threshing-machines more especially have found their way in large numbers to Austria and Hungary, which is struggling hard to be the garden of Europe. There are a hundred and one fancies on the subject of ploughs, and, although there are some forty varieties, such is the subtle touch of a really good ploughman, that he is very hard to satisfy. English counties have quite different notions as to the orthodox style of work, and proper depth of tillage. The Kentish furrows must be turned right over; those of Middlesex, Herefordshire, and Gloucestershire must be shivered; and in other counties they must be as even and true as bars of soap. The great ploughmen are like the retained jockeys of the establishment, and during the season they are always "up for the stable" somewhere, either at home or on the continent. John Hulatt is a well-known Howard's man, and has ploughed, with the same unfaltering nerve, before many crowned heads. George Brown has come back again to his original trainer; and Fred Purser, Ben Simms, and Joe Curtis are also crack men at a furrow. Since steam ploughing was introduced a new class of skilled workmen have sprung up, who are sometimes sent off perfectly alone to Spain, Germany, Egypt, or Hungary in charge of a set, so as to put the natives in the way of working it. At a day's notice they will pack up and away by "the deep sea sailings" to Australia, on the same errand. Still the best hands among the ploughmen have generally proved the aptest scholars with the steam plough and reaping machine. In fact, ploughing is one of those fine, thoughtful processes which educates a man's eye and judgment, so that he can do anything analogous to it. The largest number of steam ploughs go to Warwickshire and Staffordshire; and, in fact, all the Midland Counties have been in the van as buyers of agricultural machines and implements. The Eastern Counties have been much less spirited; and Lancashire, where the farms are only small, is still a laggard in this great cause. A few steps bring us from the heart of the finished to the noisy regions of the raw material. "The Ouse glides stealthily by the edge of the workshops, and bore, ere railway dues were reduced, its hundred tons of coals weekly from the pleasant town of Lynn;' and a troop of Priory rooks in the elms caw their hopeless protest against the hammers which have invaded their solitude. Tier after tier of pig-iron from Scotland and Barrow is reared high by the water-edge, and six score tons of it are served out 'all hot' weekly by the furnacemen to the moulders along the little tramways. Red Mansfield sand; yellow local, with more clay in it; and cream-coloured Woolwich make up, with coal-dust and a coating of charcoal, the wherewithal of the moulder's art. Three men are bending, flattening, and hardening horse-rake teeth, of which six dozen may be turned out in an hour, and twenty-eight go to a rake. Five or six men, chosen for their stalwart proportions, are holding plough breasts of 40 lbs. weight to the grindstone, as deftly as if they were razors; the clock is telling, with its unresting pointer, of four yards of wire rope for steam-ploughing woven in 25 secs. ; jets of water are giving the chilled ploughshares their earliest and most enduring notion of temper; and welding, cast and wrought iron together for haymaker barrels, is the great order of the day. "There were piles of elm and poplar in the pleasant Priory meadow, some of them sprouting before their packing-case turn arrives; and along with them ash for horse-rake and haymaker shafts, and oak for steam-plough windlasses. If the six stone coffins, which lie there as the sole above-ground relics of the Priory, could speak for their 'handfuls of white dust,' they would take comfort from the thought that wood, their supplanter, has had-at least, in its implement estate-to bow the knee to (iron) stone once more." The firm has a most varied and extensive trial ground of more than a thousand acres. The Britannia farm at Clapham, two miles out of Bedford, is on heavy, hilly ground, and Mr. Charles Howard's farm, at Biddenham, is on light and level, and half bounded by the Ouse. Cultivation at the former has been deepened from five to twelve inches, and thus more than a third has been added to the produce. In this deep trenching, the plough occasionally turns up the bones of the rein-deer, which is associated, according to the savans, in the Bedford gravel with red deer, flint implements, and the hippopotamus, as it is near Rugby with the cave hyæna. The Clapham estate, to which access is had by a private road planted with gorse, broom, and evergreens, extends over six hundred acres, which include its fifty-acre wood, a very favourite meet with Lord Dacre. When Mr. James Howard, M.P. for Bedford, bought the Clapham property, the fox preservers had not much hopes of "such a utilitarian fellow;" but they had taken his measure wrongly. Fresh rides have been cut, and as some of the hunt members thought that their vista was too extended, and that foxes would head back, small clumps of evergreens have been planted in spots to break the view. The park foxes have now, therefore, no earthly excuse for undue nervousness in cover. About thirteen were found on one day, and, in fact, they were running everywhere about three adjacent parishes, and up and down Biddenham farm as bold as if they had tickets of leave. The Grand National Steeple-Chase finished in 1867-8 at the corner of this wood, and was run over the Duke of Bedford's property, two large fields on the Clapham estate, and a small bit of the Bedford freemen's common. It was with reference to the latter easement, that a freeman was very pressing upon Mr. Verrall as the C.C. to give him "207. down,”—upon this point he was inflexible-and he would make everything comfortable and pleasant with his brother burgesses for another five shillings per head. Mr. Verrall did "not see it," and merely gazed on during his speech, in a pleasing abstraction, at the gudgeons in the Ouse. Mr. James Howard's remarkable judgment in implements has long been patent to the world; but his tastes are not confined to steel and iron. He has been very successful with live stock, and his cart-horses, spaniels, and greyhounds won prizes at the Paris Exhibition. Pigs, however, are his specialty, and we found two barns and sundry outhouses at Clapham, specially devoted to the "prizefighters." By way of a good beginning, he bought "Advance Quality!" of the large breed from Mr. Wainman's prize pen at Worcester, and another boar of the Carrhead strain, as a mate for her. With their produce he took the first prize against Mr. Wainman, at Birmingham, for the pen under six months, at his first Christmas essay, and he has won the same prize nearly every year since. At the Plymouth Royal he had the pick of Duckering's prize pen of the best sow and pigs of the large breed, and selected a boar. He took tithe wisely from that fine pen of suckers, as the young boar ripened into a first prize one at Bury Royal, and was the sire of the first prize sow from a daughter-of Advance Quality. Sending three entries, and winning two firsts, was a fine handsel to a Royal show career. Still, he inclines to Christmas fat shows, and the crucial test to which he has put the "pig dentists" would furnish a fine chapter in a treatise on the Infallibility of Pig Professors. A union of Wainman and Duckering is his only blood, and he always goes for the large sort. He once crossed for an experiment with Berkshire; but the produce would bear in rapidity of growth no comparison with the pure Yorkshire. Horses and shorthorns all find their place, and the brown hackney mare, which has taken not a few rosettes in her day, was in the strawyard with a Wingrave foal. For cart and plough Mr. Howard prefers a cross of Clydesdale with big Essex mares. Into shorthorns he has not gone very deeply; but he bought the prize cow Claret for 50 gs. at the Clifton Pastures sale. She was sold, fat and unhonoured, out of the Smithfield Club ranks, and left him Lord Claret for her keep. A railway ride of twelve miles from Bedford along the Bletchley line brought us to the station for Woburn, which is some two miles distant from it. We saw the Abbey on one of the sweetest and sunniest days that ever fell to our lot. About three thousand acres of park, arable, and woodland, are within the park ring fence, and 28,000 acres in farms form a lordly appanage. At that time about eighteen hundred acres were kept in hand, but the tillage land had been reduced from six to three hundred. Now the whole is grazed. There is a great variety of land on this home farm, of which the fine, wild park forms a part. Poor Tom Ball used to speak quite rapturously of the flying deer which were bred there, and how the Vale men rejoiced when one of those "jewels" was uncarted. In Duke John's day the antlers reigned supreme; but the pasturage has been very much improved since then, and they are now only tenants in common with the Southdown and the Hereford. Lord Dacre's hounds scarcely ever draw for a fox now; and although they once gave promise of thriving, the lack of water springs has quite banished the grouse. The late Duke kept his hunters at Oakley; but brood mares took their place, and Jem Robinson had the "purple and buff stripes, black cap," in his keeping, when His Grace had ceased, after 1828, to be an M.F.H. No man was fonder of a pack, and he often cantered up to town when Marquis of Tavistock, after a long day's hunting, to be in time for a great division. When His Grace ceased to hunt, his old whip, Tom Ball (uncle to Baron Rothschild's late huntsman), turned farmer, and kept a hunter, and he always repaired to Oakley on his return, and posted up the Duke in the sport of the day. By way of stopping a gap, His Grace was joint master of the Oakley once more, with Mr. Magniac, for a short period, between the departure of Major Hogg for the Cape, and the accession of Mr. Arkwright. It was, after all, little more than a Mastership in name, as His Grace hardly ever went out, and merely subscribed 400/. a year, and so does the present Duke. Woburn is the workshop of the estate, and "Every span of shade that steals, are devoted to some class of industry. A fifteen-horse-power engine, which is stoked with cones, sawdust, and chips, moves the whole, and drives a circular sawing machine at 1500 revolutions to the minute. Joiners, blacksmiths, and whitesmiths are all toiling under that roof. Here you find a new campanile for a school; there, is a cottage roof in embryo; while the founders are pouring metal into the sand mould for a drain-trap, or a lattice, stamped with the Bedford coronet. The walls of the steward's office speak to bygone Hereford triumphs, with their portraits of the Oakley steer, bred by John Verney, which took the Smithfield gold medal in 1836, and of the Royal prize bull at Cambridge. Life-sized pictures of the Leicester and the Southdown of the period are painted into the panels of the old office; but we look in vain for the improved Leicesters, which took the Smithfield gold medals in 1840 and 1844. A trotting horse, modelled by Sir Edwin Landseer, looks down from the vane above the stables on to the scene of "The Woburn Sheep-shearing Picture ;" but no picked English Parliament of Agriculture meets there now to handle fleeces and exchange minds under the big Dutch elm. What a troop of worthies are in the print which preserves the form and fashion of those "memorable days!" Royalty is there, or supposed to be there, in the person of the future "Sailor King," and so are three Dukes of Bedford, Francis, the fifth, on his Irish mare, handling some merino cloth; John, the sixth, on horseback as well; and the late Duke, with his brother, Earl Russell, as little boys in knee breeches. If Ellman and Overman have had an invitation to ponder over the South |