s taking honey from an
old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning
fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple--the first one to be picked from a
young tree--and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange,"
recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and,
finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while
his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have
known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time.
Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do
that. He was laid up one time--'twas when I was eighteen year old--and
he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of
course he showed me _how_. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My
father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was
mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of
course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and
a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he
never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best
training.

From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge
for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift
connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after
the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed
his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here.
Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the
second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into
a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose--a kind of
chaff-cutting box--was described to me. The same man had a horse, which
also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own
beer-brewing.

To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much by
his own observation--not, of course, intentional observation
scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation,
if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural
English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and
error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing
apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the
potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so
he watches the new mole-r