waiting for 2,000 acres. A new town has grown at Evesham, its population of 8,340 persons being almost entirely composed of gardeners and gardeners’ labourers; its markets, held twice a week, remind one of markets in the south of France; and the export traffic on the railways radiating from that little town is as lively as if it were a busy industrial spot.
One cannot read the pages given by Mr. Rider Haggard to the Bewdley and Evesham districts without being impressed by what can be obtained from the soil in England, and by what has to be done by the nation and all those who care for its well-being in obtaining from the soil what it is ready to give, if only labour be applied to it.
In the Bewdley district we see very well how the efforts of a Small Holdings Society are giving the opportunity to a number of small farmers to transform an indifferent and sometimes very poor or stony land into a fertile soil which yields rich crops of fruit, and upon which the keeping of milch-cows is combined with fruit-growing. We see also how in the big farms, as well as in the small ones, fruit-groiwing is carried on with knowledge and care — and, consequently, with a substantial profit for both the community and the farmers — which makes the author exclaim: “How different in most counties! In Norfolk, for instance (and I may add in Devonshire), the ordinary farm orchard is stocked as a rule with faggot-headed trees pruned only by the wind. Even the dead, wood is left uncut; yet it is common to hear farmers complain of the quality of the fruit, and that it will not pay to grow” (vol. i., p. 338).
Speaking of Catshill, Mr. Haggard gives also a very interesting instance of how a colony of people called “Nailers,” who lived formerly by making nails by hand, and compelled to abandon this trade when machine-made nails were introduced, took to agriculture, and how they succeed with it. Some intelligent people having bought a farm of 140 acres and divided it into small farms, from