Of milk of course, and cows, and sheep, and horses; and of your body and mine—­for we shall drink the milk and eat the meat.  And therefore it is a flesh and milk manufactory.  We must put into it every year yard-stuff, tank-stuff, guano, bones, and anything and everything of that kin, that Madam How may cook it for us into grass, and cook the grass again into milk and meat.  But if we don’t give Madam How material to work on, we cannot expect her to work for us.  And what do you think will happen then?  She will set to work for herself.  The rich grasses will dwindle for want of ammonia (that is smelling salts), and the rich clovers for want of phosphates (that is bone-earth):  and in their places will come over the bank the old weeds and grass off the moor, which have not room to get in now, because the ground is coveted already.  They want no ammonia nor phosphates—­at all events they have none, and that is why the cattle on the moor never get fat.  So they can live where these rich grasses cannot.  And then they will conquer and thrive; and the Field will turn into Wild once more.

Ah, my child, thank God for your forefathers, when you look over that boundary mark.  For the difference between the Field and the Wild is the difference between the old England of Madam How’s making, and the new England which she has taught man to make, carrying on what she had only begun and had not time to finish.

That moor is a pattern bit left to show what the greater part of this land was like for long ages after it had risen out of the sea; when there was little or nothing on the flat upper moors save heaths, and ling, and club-mosses, and soft gorse, and needle-whin, and creeping willows; and furze and fern upon the brows; and in the bottoms oak and ash, beech and alder, hazel and mountain ash, holly and thorn, with here and there an aspen or a buckthorn (berry-bearing alder as you call it), and everywhere—­where he could thrust down his long root, and thrust up his long shoots—­that intruding conqueror and insolent tyrant, the bramble.  There were sedges and rushes, too, in the bogs, and coarse grass on the forest pastures—­or “leas” as we call them to this day round here—­but no real green fields; and, I suspect, very few gay flowers, save in spring the sheets of golden gorse, and in summer the purple heather.  Such was old England—­or rather, such was this land before it was England; a far sadder, damper, poorer land than now.  For one man or one cow or sheep which could have lived on it then, a hundred can live now.  And yet, what it was once, that it might become again,—­it surely would round here, if this brave English people died out of it, and the land was left to itself once more.