Thus, Gabriel Platte, publishing his “Observations and Improvements in Husbandry,” about the year 1638, thinks it necessary to sustain and illustrate them with a record of “twenty experiments.”

Sir Richard Weston, too, a sensible up-country knight, has travelled through Flanders about the same time, and has seen such success attending upon the turnip and the clover culture there, that he urges the same upon his fellow-landholders, in a “Discourse of Husbandrie.”

The book was published under the name of Hartlib,—­the same Master Samuel Hartlib to whom Milton addressed his tractate “Of Education,” and of whom the great poet speaks as “a person sent hither [to England] by some good Providence from a far country, to be the occasion and incitement of great good to this island.”

This mention makes us curious to know something more of Master Samuel Hartlib.  I find that he was the son of a Polish merchant, of Lithuania, was himself engaged for a time in commercial transactions, and came to England about the year 1640.  He wrote several theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry.  He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths “the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery.”  The work published under his name entitled “The Legacy,” besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, embraces epistles from various farmers, who may be supposed to represent the progressive agriculture of England.  Among these letters I note one upon “Snaggreet,” (shelly earth from river-beds); another upon “Seaweeds”; a third upon “Sea-sand”; and a fourth upon “Woollen-rags.”

Hartlib was in good odor during the days of the Commonwealth; for he lived long enough to see that bitter tragedy of the executed king before Whitehall Palace, and to hold over to the early years of the Restoration.  But he was not in favor with the people about Charles II.; the small pension that Cromwell had bestowed fell into sad arrearages; and the story is, that he died miserably poor.

It is noticeable that Hartlib, and a great many sensible old gentlemen of his date, spoke of the art of husbandry as a mystery.  And so it is; a mystery then, and a mystery now.  Nothing tries my patience more than to meet one of those billet-headed farmers who—­whether in print or in talk—­pretend to have solved the mystery and mastered it.

Take my own crop of corn yonder upon the flat, which I have watched since the day when it first shot up its little dainty spears of green, until now it spindles has been faithfully ploughed and fed and tilled; but how gross appliances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that have been searching, day by day, every cranny of the soil,—­to the broad leaflets that, week by week, have stolen out from their green