out his pocket-book, and began to explain.

While thus occupied he looked anything but a farmer. His dress was indeed
light and careless, but it was the carelessness of breeding, not
slovenliness. His hands were brown, but there were clean white cuffs on
his wrist and gold studs; his neck was brown, but his linen spotless. The
face was too delicate, too refined with all its bronze; the frame was well
developed, but too active; it lacked the heavy thickness and the lumbering
gait of the farmer bred to the plough. He might have conducted a great
financial operation; he might have been the head of a great mercantile
house; he might have been on 'Change; but that stiff clay there, stubborn
and unimpressionable, was not in his style.

Cecil had gone into farming, in fact, as a 'commercial speculation,' with
the view of realising cent. per cent. He began at the time when it was
daily announced that old-fashioned farming was a thing of the past.
Business maxims and business practice were to be the rule of the future.
Farming was not to be farming; it was to be emphatically 'business,' the
same as iron, coal, or cotton. Thus managed, with steam as the motive
power, a fortune might be made out of the land, in the same way as out of
a colliery or a mine. But it must be done in a commercial manner; there
must be no restrictions upon the employment of capital, no fixed rotation
of crops, no clauses forbidding the sale of any products. Cecil found,
however, that the possessors of large estates would not let him a farm on
these conditions. These ignorant people (as he thought them) insisted upon
keeping up the traditionary customs; they would not contract themselves
out of the ancient form of lease.

But Cecil was a man of capital. He really had a large sum of money, and
this short-sighted policy (as he termed it) of the landlords only made him
the more eager to convince them how mistaken they were to refuse anything
to a man who could put capital into the soil. He resolved to be his own
landlord, and ordered his agents to find him a small estate and to
purchase it outright. There was not much difficulty in finding an estate,
and Cecil bought it. But he was even then annoyed and disgusted with the
formalities, the investigation of title, the completion of deeds, and
astounded at the length of a lawyer's bill.

Being at last established in possession Cecil set to work, and at the same
time set every agricultural tongue wagging with