there is nothing to equal plum-trees; they flourished amazingly
at Aldington, and soon made up for the lost apples; they appeared to
follow the principle that dictates the rotation of ordinary crops,
just as the leguminous plants alternate satisfactorily with the
graminaceous, or, as I have read that in Norway, where a fir forest
has been cut, birch will spring up automatically and take its place.

My predecessor always sold his plums on the trees for the buyer to
harvest, and I heard that when the former turned a flock of Dorset
ewes into one of these orchards, the buyer complained--the lower
branches being heavily laden, and within a few feet of the
ground--that he had watched, "Them old yows holding down bunches of
plums with their harns for t'others to eat." This I imagine was in the
nature of hyperbole, and not intended to be taken literally.

I had about forty cherry trees in one of my orchards, and among them a
very early kind of black cherry, as well as Black Bigarreaus, White
Heart and Elton Heart. The early ones made particularly good prices,
but when the French cherries began to be imported, being on the market
a week or two before ours they "took the keen edge off the demand,"
though wretched-looking things in comparison. The cherries from my
forty trees made L80 one year when the crop was good, but they are
expensive to pick as there is much shifting of heavy ladders, and the
work was done by men. In Kent, I believe, women are employed at
cherry-picking, ascending forty-round ladders in a gale of wind
without a sign of nervousness, but with a man in attendance to pack
the fruit and shift the ladders when required. I found Liverpool the
best market for cherries, where they were bought by the large
steamship companies for the Transatlantic liners, and where they were
in demand for the seaside and holiday places in North Wales and
Lancashire. Like the pear-trees, the cherry-trees are very beautiful
in spring, and again in autumn, and as mine could be seen from the
house and garden, they added a great charm to the place.

I must put in a word here for the bullfinch, which is unreasonably
persecuted for its supposed destruction of the cherry crop when in
bloom; it undoubtedly picks many blossoms to pieces, but probably no
ultimate loss of weight follows; very few comparatively of the blooms
ever become fruits in any case, and even if some are thus nipped in
the bud, it is probable that the remainder mature in