. His fields were
larger and fewer than I had noticed on my walk in a farm of equal
size. This feature indicates the modern improvements in English
farming more prominently to the cursory observer than any other that
attracts his eye. It is a rigidly utilitarian innovation on the old
system, that does not at all promise to improve the picturesque
aspect of the country. To "reconstruct the map" of a county, by
wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after grubbing up
all the hedges and hedge-trees, would doubtless add seven and a
quarter per cent. to the agricultural production of the shire, and
gratify many a Gradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would
know England after such a transformation? One would be prone to
reiterate Patrick's exclamation of surprise, when he first
shouldered a gun and tested the freedom of the forest in America.
Seeing a small bird in the top of a tree, he pointed the fowling-
piece in that direction, turned away his face, and fired. A tree-
toad fell to the ground from an agitated branch. The exulting
Irishman ran and picked it up in triumph, and held it out at arm's
length by one of its hind legs, exclaiming, "And how it alters a
bird to shoot its feathers off, to be sure!" It would alter England
nearly as much in aspect, if the unsparing despotism of pounds s. d.
should root out the hedge-row trees, and substitute invisible lines
of wire for the flowering hawthorn as a fencing for those fields
which now look so much like framed portraits of Nature's best
painting.

The tendency of these utilitarian times may well occasion an
unpleasant concern in the lovers of English rural scenery. What
changes may come in the wake of the farmer's steam-engine, steam-
plough, or under the smoke-shadows from his factory-like chimney,
these recent "improvements" may suggest and induce. One can see in
any direction he may travel these changes going on silently. Those
little, unique fields, defined by lines and shapes unknown to
geometry, are going out of the rural landscape. And when they are
gone, they will be missed more than the amateurs of agricultural
artistry imagine at the present moment. What some one has said of
the peasantry, may be said, with almost equal deprecation, of these
picturesque tit-bits of land, which,--

"Once destroyed, never can be supplied."

And destroyed they will be, as sure as science. As large farms are
swallowing up the little ones between t