On a Lincolnshire farm where I was a pupil, an incident occurred illustrating the anxiety of a carter for the welfare of his horses, in combination with no small cunning.  The owner, in the stable one Sunday morning, noticed an open Bible in the manger; having doubts as to the reliability of the carter, he regarded the Bible, so prominently displayed, with some suspicion.  Looking carefully all round he could see nothing to find fault with, until he glanced upward at the floor over the manger, where he discovered a protruding cork.  He remembered that a heap of oats was stored in the loft, from which the bailiff gave out the rations for their teams to each man weekly.  Getting the key of the loft, he found that the cork was nicely adjusted to a hole beneath the oats, so that the carter in question could exceed the recognized ration whenever inclined.  The fault was, of course, more one of disobedience than of robbery, as the corn was consumed by his master’s horses, and the prominence of the Bible was perhaps the worst feature, evidently a deceptive device to arrest suspicion, though it proved to have exactly the opposite effect.

Very few of my men suffered from rheumatism, but Jim was an exception.  I think he applied horse embrocation to himself; he would extol its efficacy, and would tell how, when the pain attacked his shoulder, the remedy “druv it” to his back; applied to the latter, “it druv it” to his legs; and so on indefinitely.

I kept about a dozen working horses besides colts; the latter are broken at two years old, but only very lightly worked, and, when quiet and handy, they are turned out again till a year older.  Our method of maintaining the full capacity of horse-power on the farm was to breed, or buy at six months old, two colts, and sell off two of the oldest horses every year.  As two colts could be bought for forty or fifty pounds at that age, and the two old horses sold for a hundred and twenty pounds or thereabouts, a good balance was left on the transaction, while the full strength of the teams was maintained.

Jim had sufficient foresight to view with alarm the gradual dispersion of most of the oldest and best farmers in the neighbourhood, and the conversion to grass of the arable land, owing to the unfair and dangerous competition of American wheat.  When we discussed the subject and foretold the straits to which the country would be reduced in the event of war with a great European Power, he concluded these forebodings with the habitual remark, “Well, what I says is, them as lives longest will see the most.”  A truism, no doubt, but, as time has proved, by no means an incorrect view.

There was always plenty of employment for an estate carpenter on my farms, as I had a vast number of buildings, including four separate sets of barn, stable, sheds, and yard, away from the village, as well as those near the Manor House, and many repairs were necessary.  There were, too, very many gates, repairs to fences, hurdle-making, and odd jobs, to keep a man employed for months at a time.  The building of three hop-kilns, with the necessary storerooms for green and dried hops, as the hop acreage increased, the preparation of hop-poles, and the erection of wire-work on larger poles, which gradually superseded the ordinary pole system, all demanded a great deal of regular work.