While thus occupied he looked anything but a farmer.  His dress was indeed light and careless, but it was the carelessness of breeding, not slovenliness.  His hands were brown, but there were clean white cuffs on his wrist and gold studs; his neck was brown, but his linen spotless.  The face was too delicate, too refined with all its bronze; the frame was well developed, but too active; it lacked the heavy thickness and the lumbering gait of the farmer bred to the plough.  He might have conducted a great financial operation; he might have been the head of a great mercantile house; he might have been on ’Change; but that stiff clay there, stubborn and unimpressionable, was not in his style.

Cecil had gone into farming, in fact, as a ‘commercial speculation,’ with the view of realising cent. per cent.  He began at the time when it was daily announced that old-fashioned farming was a thing of the past.  Business maxims and business practice were to be the rule of the future.  Farming was not to be farming; it was to be emphatically ‘business,’ the same as iron, coal, or cotton.  Thus managed, with steam as the motive power, a fortune might be made out of the land, in the same way as out of a colliery or a mine.  But it must be done in a commercial manner; there must be no restrictions upon the employment of capital, no fixed rotation of crops, no clauses forbidding the sale of any products.  Cecil found, however, that the possessors of large estates would not let him a farm on these conditions.  These ignorant people (as he thought them) insisted upon keeping up the traditionary customs; they would not contract themselves out of the ancient form of lease.

But Cecil was a man of capital.  He really had a large sum of money, and this short-sighted policy (as he termed it) of the landlords only made him the more eager to convince them how mistaken they were to refuse anything to a man who could put capital into the soil.  He resolved to be his own landlord, and ordered his agents to find him a small estate and to purchase it outright.  There was not much difficulty in finding an estate, and Cecil bought it.  But he was even then annoyed and disgusted with the formalities, the investigation of title, the completion of deeds, and astounded at the length of a lawyer’s bill.

Being at last established in possession Cecil set to work, and at the same time set every agricultural tongue wagging within a radius of twenty miles.  He grubbed up all the hedges, and threw the whole of his arable land into one vast field, and had it levelled with the theodolite.  He drained it six feet deep at an enormous cost.  He built an engine-shed with a centrifugal pump, which forced water from the stream that ran through the lower ground over the entire property, and even to the topmost storey of his house.  He laid a light tramway across the widest part of his estate, and sent the labourers to and fro their work in trucks.  The chaff-cutters, root-pulpers, the winnowing-machine—­everything was driven by steam.  Teams of horses and waggons seemed to be always going to the canal wharf for coal, which he ordered from the pit wholesale.