At Bardfield I was again homed for the night by a Friend; and after tea made an evening walk with him about the farm of a member of the same society, living in the outskirts of the town, who cultivates about 400 acres of excellent land, and is considered one of the most practical and successful agriculturists of Essex.  His fields were larger and fewer than I had noticed on my walk in a farm of equal size.  This feature indicates the modern improvements in English farming more prominently to the cursory observer than any other that attracts his eye.  It is a rigidly utilitarian innovation on the old system, that does not at all promise to improve the picturesque aspect of the country.  To “reconstruct the map” of a county, by wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after grubbing up all the hedges and hedge-trees, would doubtless add seven and a quarter per cent. to the agricultural production of the shire, and gratify many a Gradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would know England after such a transformation?  One would be prone to reiterate Patrick’s exclamation of surprise, when he first shouldered a gun and tested the freedom of the forest in America.  Seeing a small bird in the top of a tree, he pointed the fowling-piece in that direction, turned away his face, and fired.  A tree-toad fell to the ground from an agitated branch.  The exulting Irishman ran and picked it up in triumph, and held it out at arm’s length by one of its hind legs, exclaiming, “And how it alters a bird to shoot its feathers off, to be sure!” It would alter England nearly as much in aspect, if the unsparing despotism of pounds s. d. should root out the hedge-row trees, and substitute invisible lines of wire for the flowering hawthorn as a fencing for those fields which now look so much like framed portraits of Nature’s best painting.

The tendency of these utilitarian times may well occasion an unpleasant concern in the lovers of English rural scenery.  What changes may come in the wake of the farmer’s steam-engine, steam-plough, or under the smoke-shadows from his factory-like chimney, these recent “improvements” may suggest and induce.  One can see in any direction he may travel these changes going on silently.  Those little, unique fields, defined by lines and shapes unknown to geometry, are going out of the rural landscape.  And when they are gone, they will be missed more than the amateurs of agricultural artistry imagine at the present moment.  What some one has said of the peasantry, may be said, with almost equal deprecation, of these picturesque tit-bits of land, which,—­

     “Once destroyed, never can be supplied.”

And destroyed they will be, as sure as science.  As large farms are swallowing up the little ones between them, so large fields are swallowing these interesting patches, the broad-bottomed hedging of which sometimes measures as many square yards as the space it encloses.