of
sympathy." Eventually he became a permanent inmate of the workhouse,
much to my grief; but it is, of course, impossible to run a farm on
which heavy poor-rate has to be paid, as a philanthropic institution.
The difficulty with aged and infirm persons is not so much food and
maintenance as the necessity for nursing and supervision, which are
expensive and difficult to arrange. Tricker told me that he could live
on sixpence a day, and if it had been a question of food only, and our
village could have cut itself adrift from the Union and the rates it
entailed, we could easily have more than kept the poor old man to the
end of his days in comfort. For years he was the only parishioner
receiving any help from the immense sum the parish annually paid in
rates. I have heard it said that out of every shilling of the
ratepayer's contributions the poor people only get twopence or its
equivalent, the officials and administration expenses absorbing the
remaining tenpence.

My first gardener had been employed at the Manor, when I came, for
very many years, and at the end of ten more he was obliged to resign
through old age. He had planted the poplars round the mill-pond in his
earliest days, and, among other trees, the beautiful weeping wych-elm
on the lawn behind the house. The weeping effect he produced by
beheading the tree when quite small and grafting it with a slip of the
weeping variety, and the junction was still plainly visible. It was a
symmetrical and, especially when in bloom, a lovely tree, but as the
blossoms died and scattered themselves all over the grass, they
worried the methodical old man, and every spring he wished it had
never been planted. It had flourished amazingly, and we could
comfortably find sitting room at tea for sixty or seventy people at a
garden-party in its shade.

He was an excellent gardener, but did not care about novelties in
flowers, though at one time he made a hobby of raising new kinds of
potatoes. His greatest success was the original Ashleaf variety, the
stock of which he sold to Mr. Myatt for a guinea, and which was
afterwards introduced to the public as "Myatt's Early Ashleaf." It was
one of the best potatoes ever grown, very early, and splendid in
quality, and it was unfortunate that he parted with it so cheaply,
though, of course, the purchaser of the first few tubers had no idea
of its immense potential value, and possibly, like so many novelties,
it might have proved a failure