lphin
edition of Virgil's _Georgics_ when I was at school; and it is drawn
indifferently by horses, bullocks, or heifers. Bullocks and heifers
are, however, more commonly used than horses, though it is no unusual
sight to see a horse and a heifer yoked together. There is no boy to
drive; but the ploughman, as in Scotland, at once holds the stilts of
the plough, and with his voice, and a long halter, guides the cattle.
With respect to the harrows, I saw little difference between them and
our English implements, except that those in Germany are lighter, and
never have more than one horse or one bullock attached to them.

The rest of their tools, such as forks, rakes, mattocks, spades, &c.,
very much resemble our own; with this difference, in reference to the
last, that in Germany much less iron is wasted upon them than upon
similar articles in England. The blade of a German spade, which, by the
way, is pointed, or, rather, semicircular in form, is composed of wood
to within a few inches of the edge, and there is no iron at all upon
the handle.

I am not quite sure that I perfectly understood my intelligent
companion, when we came to discuss the amount of crop raised from the
land, and the prices fetched by the different kinds of grain in the
market. His method of computing these matters was so different from any
to which I had been accustomed, that I could only guess at a parallel
between it and our English measures. Yet it struck me that he described
the wheat lands as producing, on an average, between three and four
quarters; of which the price varied from twenty-one to twenty-five
shillings of our money. Concerning the price of the rye I had less
curiosity, though that seemed to repay the farmer quite as abundantly
as wheat; at least, my friend assured me that it would not answer his
purpose to substitute wheat for rye, even now, when wheat was more than
usually in demand, and therefore fetched a more than usually high
price. For it is worthy of remark that the failure of the crops in
America had affected the corn-market even in Bohemia; from which remote
district people were transmitting quantities of wheat to supply the
necessities of the squatters among the back woods of Kentucky.

From the subject of agriculture we passed on to its kindred topics,
grazing and planting; the latter of which naturally led to a discussion
on fuel. I learned from him, that here, as elsewhere in the north and
centre of Germany, there