directions in which it is to be conducted.  The pipe used for each cow-box or manger connects each with the cistern, and the distributing end of it rests upon, or is suspended over, the trough assigned to each animal.  About one-third of this trough, which was here a cast-iron box, about twelve inches deep and wide, protrudes through the boarding of the stable.  In this outside compartment is placed a hollow copper ball attached to a lever, which turns the axle or pivot of the cock.  Now, this little buoy, of course, rises and falls with the water in the trough.  When the trough is full, the buoy rises and raises the lever so as to shut off the water entirely.  At every sip the animal takes, the buoy descends and lets on again, to a drop, a quantity equal to that abstracted from the inside compartment.  Thus the trough is always kept full of pure water, without losing a drop of it through a waste-pipe or overflow.  Where a great herd of cattle and a drove of horses have to be supplied from a deep well, as in the case of Mr. Jonas, at Chrishall Grange, this buoy-cock must save a great amount of labor.

I saw also here in perfection that garden allotment system which is now coming widely into vogue in England, not only adjoining large towns like Birmingham, but around small villages in the rural districts.  It is well worthy of being introduced in New England and other states, where it would work equally well in various lines of influence.  A landowner divides up a field into allotments, each generally containing a rood, and lets them to the mechanics, tradespeople and agricultural laborers of the town or village, who have no gardens of their own for the growth of vegetables.  Each of these is better than a savings-bank to the occupant.  He not only deposits his odd pennies but his odd hours in it; keeping both away from the public-house or from places and habits of idleness and dissipation.  The days of Spring and Summer here are very long, and a man can see to work in the field as early as three o’clock in the morning, and as late as nine at night.  So every journeyman blacksmith, baker or shoemaker may easily find four or five hours in the twenty-four for work on his allotment, after having completed the task or time due to his employer.  He generally keeps a pig, and is on the qui vive to make and collect all the manure he can for his little farm.  A field of several acres, thus divided and cultivated in allotments, presents as striking a combination of colors as an Axminster carpet.  As every rood is subdivided into a great variety of vegetables, and as forty or fifty of such patches, lying side by side, present, in one coup d’oeil, all the alternations of which these crops and colors are susceptible, the effect is very picturesque.