thousand pounds. They were working college
and farm at a loss, and had not much to say for
the results produced. Even the art of
managing the hearty, free-spirited farmers' sons,
accustomed to much outdoor sport and little
study, who then came to the college, had yet to
be learnt. One day a rat was brought to the
lecture room of an unpopular professor, let
loose in lecture time with a sudden slamming
of every desk, hunted, killed, and thrown in the
professor's face.

Then there was the very troublesome fact of
the overdrawn ten thousand. The promoters
met to consider whether the college was to be
closed as a failure. The result of discussion was
that the work of the place lay before it, not the
less clear for its early errors and shortcomings.
Earl Ducie, Earl Bathurst, Mr. Sotheron
Estcourt, and Mr. Edward Holland, who had first
offered himself to bear the whole responsibility,
became, with Mr. Langston, answerable for
all the college debts, and by right of this
responsibility, they took upon themselves its
management. Upon their personal security
upwards of thirty thousand pounds were added
to the original subscriptions and donations.
These gentlemen now constitute the Council of
the College, and under their supervision it has
become what it now is, not yet the best
conceivable thing of its kind, but the best and most
successful agricultural college that has yet been
founded anywhere.

It stands about a mile out of Cirencester,
facing Oakley Park, whose beautiful woods
were so familiar to Pope that in his later years
he wrote thence to Martha Blount, " You can-
not think how melancholy this place makes
me. Every part of this wood puts into my
mind poor Mr. Gay, with whom I passed once
a great deal of pleasant time in it, and another
friend, who is near dead, and quite lost to us,
Dr. Swift." And he said that he felt in it
"the same sort of uneasiness as I find at
Twickenham whenever I pass my mother's
room." Alas that Pope's melancholy should
be perpetuated, for there is talk of placing a
new cemetery midway between the town and
the college, a cheerful addition to what now is
an agreeable promenade. So planted, on high and
healthy ground, six hundred feet above the sea
level, and with no buildings but its own in sight,
the college is as pleasant a place of residence
as any one could wish who takes delight in
English country air and scenery. The Farmers'
College is as rural in all its surroundings as
the farmer's occupation. Its massive and
roomy farm buildings are a quarter of a mile
distant from it. They include a fixed engine
of ten-horse power, which works a threshing-
mill, a pair of stones for bruising or grinding,
the chaff and root cutters, and also the pumps.
There are the feeding-boxes and cow-house,
the chaff and root house, where all material is
prepared for the stock, which is lodged close
by in yards, and sheds, and styes. The cart-
stable is so divided that each animal can move
about at pleasure, and be fed at the head. An
opposite line of buildings includes the
slaughterhouse, tool and artificial manure house,
office, and blacksmiths' and carpenters' shops,
in which useful lessons may be taken by those
students who are about to emigrate. Under
the roofs of these buildings are shed-room,
straw and hay lofts, and granary. Add to all
these a roomy rickyard and the residences of
the bailiff and tenant, an old student of
the college, who took honours there in his
time, is thoroughly interested in the college
work, and goes through his business with all
his methods of proceeding open to the daily
observation of the students. This gentleman
cultivates the five hundred acres on his own
account. Farm management by the collective
understanding of a body corporate could
scarcely pay. By a turnpike road that intersects
the farm is another of the outlying buildings,
the Veterinary Hospital, under the
management of the veterinary professor. The
college is obliged usually to buy instructive
cases of disease. Farmers are more ready to
kill cattle when they begin to sicken than to
incur doctor's bills of, say, a couple of pounds
apiece on their account; and if they have a
sick horse they don't take very well to the
notion of its being argued over in clinical
lectures before sixty or seventy students. They
have a mistaken dread, too, of the humour for
experiment in scientific men, and fear lest,
when they send a horse to be cured,

Dread feats shall follow, and disasters great,
Pills charge on pills, and bolus bolus meet.

Still cases do come in the natural way for the
safest and best treatment to be had in that part
of the country, and the deficiency is made up by
a discreet purchase of diseased beasts.

As to the farm, of its five hundred acres,
forty acres are in pasture, the rest arable. The
soil, which belongs to the Bath oolitic formation,
is composed of clays, marls, limestones, and
inferior brash, the last named and least valuable
form of soil predominating. But the variations
are so frequent that in a furrow of ten chains in
length the plough will often pass through soil
alternating from brash to rich loam, or it may
be to a cold tenacious clay. There are twenty
fields, varying in size from ten to fifty acres;
two thirds of the land is handy to the farm
buildings, the rest scattered, difficult of access,
and with an irregular surface, costly therefore
to cultivate. These differences of condition,
which might vex a farmer who looked only to
money profit from the land, are full of interest
and information for the student who is well
taught to observe.

The flock on the farm comprises two hundred
and fifty breeding ewes, pure Cotswold; there
are twelve milch cows, for the supply of
college milk; nine carefully selected horses
of the Clydesdale, Suffolk, and West Country
breeds, and pigs, pure Berkshire. These
are winning honours as prize takers. They
have among them now, as far as prizes can
bear witness to such a fact, the first pig of the