Alas! the goats quickly obtained so evil a reputation, worse than that of the rabbits for biting off the shooting vegetation, that no one would have them on the land.  The milk was all the analysis declared it, but in that outlying village, which did not contain two houses above the quality of a farmstead, there was no one to buy it.  There was a prejudice against the butter which could not be got over; and the cheese—­well, the cheese resembled a tablet of dark soap.  Hodge would not eat it at a gift; he smelt it, picked a morsel off on the tip of his clasp knife, and threw it aside in contempt.  One by one the goats were got rid of, and now but two or three remained; she could not make up her mind to part with all, for living creatures, however greatly they have disappointed, always enlist the sympathies of women.

Poultry was the next grand discovery—­they ate their heads off, refused to lay eggs, and, when by frequent purchase they became numerous and promised to pay, quietly died by the score, seized with an epidemic.  She learnt in visiting the cottagers how profitable their allotment gardens were to them, and naturally proceeded to argue that a larger piece of ground would yield proportionately larger profit if cultivated on the same principle.  If the cottagers could pay a rent for an acre which, in the aggregate, was three times that given by the ordinary farmer, and could even then make a good thing of it, surely intelligence and skill might do the same on a more extended scale.  How very foolish the farmers were! they might raise at least four times the produce they did, and they might pay three times the rent.  As the vicar had some hundred and fifty acres of glebe let at the usual agricultural rent, if the tenants could be persuaded or instructed to farm on the cottager’s system, what an immense increase it would be to his income!  The tenants, however, did not see it.  They shrugged their shoulders, and made no movement The energetic lady resolved to set an example, and to prove to them that they were wrong.

She rented an acre of arable land (at the side of the field), giving the tenant a fair price for it.  First it had to be enclosed so as to be parted off from the open field.  The cost of the palings made the vicar wince; his lady set it duly down to debit.  She planted one-half potatoes, as they paid thirty pounds per acre, and on the rest put in hundreds of currant bushes, set a strawberry bed and an asparagus bed, on the principle that luxuries of that kind fetch a high price and occupy no more space than cabbages.  As the acre was cultivated entirely by the spade, the cost of the labour expended upon it ran up the figures on the debit side to an amount which rather startled her.  But the most dispiriting part of the commencement was the length of time to wait before a crop came.  According to her calculations that represented so much idle capital sunk, instead of being rapidly turned over.  However, she consoled herself with the pig-sty, in which were half a dozen animals, whose feeding she often personally superintended.