Replies: “I delight in these crushes,
One can talk though the dances are full;
You don’t go next week to the duchess?
Then I’m sure I shall find it quite dull.”
But now for the next dance they’re starting,
She shrinks to the chaperon’s wings;
You press the small hand in the parting,
And her eyes say unspeakable things.
You cherish for many days after
The look that so lovingly beams:
’Tis a sorrow that stifles your laughter,
’Tis a joy that is bright on your dreams.
You fancy, so lightly she dances,
Her dear little foot on your stair;
You people with those sunny glances
A sweet little home in May Fair:
You saw that all eyes were upon her
As she moved down that glittering room,
And you fancy, when once you have won her,
How pretty she’ll look in your brougham.
O! visions that madly you cherish;
O! smile that was cruelly false;
O! hopes that were born but to perish;
O! dream that has fled with the valse!
When next you meet, doffing your beaver,
You look for her bow—but in vain—
The dear little ball-room deceiver
Doesn’t offer to know you again.
Can it be you have flirted together?—
Now she on her hack canters by;
And you’re not worth one wave of her feather;
You’re not worth one glance of her eye.
Then, like ships without sailors to man ’em,
Your visions seem drifting away,
And you count your few hundreds per annum,
And their fractions at each Quarter-day.
And this, when you sum the case up, is
The result (though your feelings it hurts),—
All men are self-confident puppies,
All women are frivolous flirts!
OUR FARM OF TWO ACRES.
TERRAIN AND TILLAGE.
Half a century ago there was a good deal of sauciness in the temper and manners of people who had the management of land. The great landowners were introducing improvements, the small farmers were giving up an unprofitable game, and the large farmers—trusting in the Corn-laws—claimed to have their own way, did not care to study their art, unless they lived near Mr. Coke or the Duke of Bedford, and laughed at everybody who attempted tillage on a small scale.
This sauciness brought out William Cobbett, with his strong spirit of antagonism, to contradict every insolent saying, and almost every received maxim of the class; and he broadly and positively declared that a cow and pig could be kept on a quarter of an acre of land. He explained in detail how this might be done; and a great number of people have followed his instructions, finding, for the most part, that though the thing might be practicable for one year, or occasionally at intervals, it is not true that, one year with another, a cow and pig can be kept on a quarter of an acre of land. Since the repeal of the Corn laws great changes have taken place in the general mind as to what quantity of land will and will not repay the efforts of the husbandman. The prodigious improvements which have been introduced into agriculture have benefited small properties as well as large; and the same science and art which render it good economy to expend thousands of pounds on the tillage of a large farm enable the intelligent husbandman to obtain from a few roods an amount of value which nobody but Cobbett dreamed of in the last generation. We do not know that the regular “small-farming” of a former century has as yet revived among us; the competition of the holder of thirty or fifty acres with the tenant of a thousand: but the experiment of making the most of two or three acres is at present one which attracts a good deal of attention. There are few signs of the times in economy and social affairs more thoroughly worthy of the interest it has excited.
There are two classes of persons, broadly speaking, to whom this experiment is of consequence—the husbandman who lives by his land, and gentry, especially ladies, who happen to have a little ground attached to their dwellings, from which it is just as well to derive comfort and luxury, or pecuniary profit, as not. Two remarkable and very interesting statements have been published on the part of these two classes; and I, the present writer, am about to offer a third, in order to render the presentment of the case of miniature farming complete.
John Sillett, the Suffolk shopkeeper, who forsook the shop and took to the spade, recovering his health, and maintaining his family in comfort on two acres of land, has given us his experience in his well-known pamphlet of seven years ago, on “Fork and Spade Husbandry.” The great extension of Freehold Land Societies affords to a multitude of townsmen in England the means of leaving town-industry for rural independence, as John Sillett did, if they choose to work as he did; and it seems probable that a future generation may see a revival of the order of peasant proprietors in this country which was supposed to have died out for ever. As to the other class to whom small-farming may and does answer, we have just been presented with an agreeable description of their case in the little volume called “Our Farm of Four Acres, and the Money we made by it.” In my opinion the book is somewhat too tempting. The statements, each one no doubt perfectly true in itself, will require some modification when taken to represent the first six years, instead of the first six months of the experiment; but the narrative is so fresh and animated—the example of enterprise and energy is so wholesome, and the scheme of life is so wise, that the book must be a real