VIII., though at the present time our best varieties are far superior.

The holly is only seen as garden hedges in the more sandy parishes of
Worcestershire, but here in the Forest it is a splendid feature,
growing to a great size and height. In winter its bright shining
leaves reflecting the sunlight enliven the woods, so that we never get
the bare and cheerless look of places where the elm and the whitethorn
hedge dominate the landscape. In spring its small white blossoms are
thickly distributed, and at Christmas its scarlet berries are ever
welcome. Its prickles protect it from browsing cattle and Forest
ponies, but it is interesting to notice that many of the leaves on the
topmost branches being out of reach of the animals are devoid of this
protection.

CHAPTER XVII.

CORN--WHEAT--RIDGE AND FURROW--BARLEY--FARMERS NEWSTYLE AND OLDSTYLE.

"He led me thro' the short sweet-smelling lanes
Of his wheat-suburb, babbling as he went."
--_The Brook_.

I do not propose to enter upon the ordinary details of arable farming,
as not of very general interest, except for those actually engaged
thereon. I am aiming especially at the more unusual crops, and what I
may call the curiosities of agriculture. It is most interesting to
turn to Virgil's _Georgics_ and see how they apply after the lapse of
nearly twenty centuries to the farm-work of the present day. Horace,
too, was a farmer, though perhaps more of an amateur; he exclaims at
the busy scene presented when men and horses are engaged in active
field work:

"_Heu heu! quantus equis quantus adest viris Sudor!_"

which, by the way, was rendered with Victorian propriety by a
well-known Oxford professor, "What a quantity of perspiration!" etc.
Probably Horace had been watching the sowing of barley or oats on a
fine March morning, "the peck of March dust," which we know is "worth
a King's ransom," flying behind the harrows. George Cruikshank gives a
very spirited and comic realization of Horace's lines, in Hoskin's
_Talpa_, where ploughing, sowing, harrowing, reaping, harvesting,
thrashing, grinding and carting away the finished product, are all
actively proceeding in the same field.

The origin of the word "field," still locally pronounced "feld," as in
"Badsey Feld," near Evesham, takes us back to primeval times when the
country was mostly forest, of which certain parts had been "felled,"
and were thu