The said figures utterly bewilder the visitor, who in courtesy runs his eye from top to bottom of the long columns—­farming accounts are really the most complicated that can be imagined—­so he, meantime, while turning over the pages, mentally absorbs the personality of the commercial agriculturist.  He sees a tall, thin farmer, a brown face and neck, long restless sinewy hands, perpetually twiddling with a cigar or a gold pencil-case—­generally the cigar, or rather the extinct stump of it, which he every now and then sucks abstractedly, in total oblivion as to its condition.  His dress would pass muster in towns—­well cut, and probably from Bond Street.  He affects a frock and high hat one day, and knickerbockers and sun helmet the next.  His pockets are full of papers, letters, etc., and as he searches amid the mass for some memorandum to show, glimpses may be seen of certain oblong strips of blue paper with an impressed stamp.

‘Very satisfactory,’ says the visitor, handing back No 6 B; ’may I inquire how many acres you occupy?’

Out comes a note-book.  ’Hum!  There’s a thousand down in the vale, and fifteen hundred upland, and the new place is about nine hundred, and the meadows—­I’ve mislaid the meadows—­but it’s near about four thousand.  Different holdings, of course.  Great nuisance that, sir; transit, you see, costs money.  City gentlemen know that.  Absurd system in this country—­the land parcelled out in little allotment gardens of two or three hundred acres.  Why, there’s a little paltry hundred and twenty acre freehold dairy farm lies between my vale and upland, and the fellow won’t let my waggons or ploughing-tackle take the short cut, ridiculous.  Time it was altered, sir.  Shooting?  Why, yes; I have the shooting.  Glad if you’d come over.’

Then more Madeira, and after it a stroll through the gardens and shrubberies and down to the sheds, a mile, or nearly, distant.  There, a somewhat confused vision of ‘grand shorthorns,’ and an inexplicable jumble of pedigrees, grand-dams, and ‘g-g-g-g-g-g-dams,’ as the catalogues have it; handsome hunters paraded, steam-engines pumping water, steam-engines slicing up roots, distant columns of smoke where steam-engines are tearing up the soil.  All the while a scientific disquisition on ammonia and the constituent parts and probable value of town sewage as compared with guano.  And at intervals, and at parting, a pressing invitation to dinner [when pineapples or hot-house grapes are certain to make their appearance at dessert]—­such a flow of genial eloquence surely was never heard before!

It requires a week at least of calm reflection, and many questions to his host, before the visitor—­quite carried away—­can begin to arrange his ideas, and to come slowly to the opinion that though Mr. X——­ is as open as the day and frank to a fault, it will take him a precious long time to get to the bottom of Mr. X——­’s system; that is to say, if there is any bottom at all to it.