s at
home.

And there was the abandonment of the Corn Market proper, for the class
of farmers who survived hated to transact their business indoors. The
attendance of millers and dealers, except of those who had cargoes of
foreign corn at Gloucester or Bristol to dispose of, became irregular.
Sales of farm stock and implements took place in every village on
farms which had passed from father to son for generations, coupled
with the sacrifice of valuable implements and machinery for want of
buyers. There followed the stage when landowners who could find no
tenants, and had heavily mortgaged estates, essayed to make the best
of them by laying away the arable land to pasture, undertaking the
management themselves with, perhaps, an old broken-down tenant as
bailiff. The politicians and the general public did not apprehend the
danger of the situation, in spite of innumerable warnings, until the
German submarines were sending our foreign food supplies to the bottom
of the sea; and now that the immediate danger of starvation has
passed, they appear already to have lapsed again into an attitude of
apathy.

We hear the blessed word "reconstruction" on every side, but the only
official propositions for the permanent establishment of agricultural
prosperity that I have heard are utterly inadequate. It is ridiculous
to suppose that a few thousand acres of special crops, like tobacco,
for instance, only possible in favoured spots, can in any way
compensate for the loss of millions of acres of arable land under
rotations of corn and green crops. Under present conditions nothing is
more certain than the abandonment of arable land as such; and it is
folly to talk of novel systems of transport for a dwindling output, or
of building labourers' cottages at an unjustifiable cost, which are
never likely to be wanted by a dying industry.

Among my experiences of abnormal weather, I have a note of a
remarkable summer flood on July 21, 1875, when my hay was lying in the
meadows beside the brooks, and had to be removed to higher ground in
pouring rain to prevent its disappearance with the current. On the
following day, July 22, the highest flood since 1845 occurred at
Evesham.

October 14, 1877, was memorable for the most terrific south-west gale
that happened in all the years I passed at Aldington; thirteen trees,
mostly old apple trees and elms, were blown down, including the
splendid veteran "Chate boy" pear tree at Blackminster, an ex