but they did bring it up to a few hundreds ment of more than a hundred thousand pounds, over twenty thousand pounds. The managers, in addition to the considerable grant of land delivering themselves up to unrestrained en- from Congress to a state that would provide joyment of a good dabble in-the mud-pie agricultural teaching, on condition that the making of our maturer years-bricks and mor- whole should go to the founding of a single tar, produced a handsome edifice, with a frontage institution, not as a grant to be divided among of nearly two hundred feet, battlemented tower, several districts. The result is the Cornell gable roofs, and lofty gothic windows. Rooms University in the State of New York, one made, of course, to the windows, instead of department of which is planned upon the windows to the rooms, were often spacious only model of Cirencester, and forms the only good in height. Lofty they must be, because the agricultural college in the United States. ceiling is usually looked for somewhere above There is a large agricultural school at Yale, but the top of the window; and the bottom of the it is not very efficient. Mr. Cornell was told at window, itself lofty, would be so high above the Cirencester of the complete failure there of floor that a student might have to stand on a the system of paying students wages for field chair to see the ground outside. There was a labour. Nevertheless he means to try it in dining hall so high that, without making it a America, but not in the same form. The large bit too low, a very fine museum has been got endowment makes the teaching practically graby laying a floor midway across it. But on the tuitous in his new university. The farmwork whole, no doubt, a very durable and handsome is not required of any as a necessary part of college was erected, which by some trouble and the routine, but it is open to all. Thus it is thought has, in course of years, become as con- thought that the poorest father may send an venient and comfortable as if the architect him- industrious son to this new institution, with self had been vulgar enough to care for the the assurance that while he receives intellectual convenience of its inmates. The architect- training he may earn enough to pay his moderate several of his craft have done the same within expenses, finding also suitable work ready to his the present century-considerably exceeded his hand, and a state of opinion among his fellows estimates. The managers of the new college trained to recognise it as both useful and honourwere sanguine, and had all their experience to able. In fact, we are told by newspapers that in buy; there was no other agricultural college this first session of the Cornell University some in the country by whose early mistakes they youths entered three months before the classes might profit; so they began, like heroes, with an opened for the sake of earning two dollars a offer of board, lodging, practical and scientific day through haying and harvest towards their education, all for thirty pounds a year. What winter expenses. The Cirencester students did could be more desirable than that? How lovely not work like men who labour for a living. the intrepid front of youth!" Experience the When the poor student at a Scottish university, first showed that while each student paid thirty who supplies, doubtless, another of Mr. Corpounds a year for everything, he cost the college nell's models, is proud to earn by work of his thirty-two for meat and drink alone. That hands in leisure time the money spent on culti being so, how was the debt on the buildings to vation of his intellect, he works nobly, indeed, be met? How were the teachers to be paid? but under the strong joint pressure of need Out of the profits of the farm? Aye, but and ambition. The common labourer works to that, too, was managed at a loss. There feed himself and his wife and children; but the was a bright ideal notion that students should young student whose actual wants are paid for become practically acquainted with every de- by his father's cheque, and who goes out with tail of farm work-hoeing, digging, paring a troop of light-hearted young fellows in his turnips, feeding sheep, and so forth; but that own position to play at field labour in the name if they did field labour they gave service worth of education, and to have his earnings put wages, and should be credited with wages of down to his father's credit, is the most unprotheir work. Thus it was thought that their fitable of all known sorts of farm servant. He industry might pay some part of the cost of turns work into play, smokes under hedges, their maintenance. And, behold, there was a and even when he does get through a certain book kept in which every student was credited quantity of work, is not to be relied upon for with the wages of such work as he did on the doing it at the right time, or thoroughly. farm. Such work! Well. The same bright When the business of the college farm required speculation is to be tried under different and that certain work should be completed in a far more hopeful conditions at the new Cornell certain field by a particular day, the chance University in New York. would be that it was not done, or done badly, if it was entrusted to the students. To the students of that day: we speak of times completely gone, of difficulties conquered, partly by abandonment of efforts in a wrong direction; but the results of the first years of work in the Agricultural College at Cirencester were disappointing. In the year 'forty-eight the managers found that they had overdrawn their account at the bank to the extent of about ten The plan of the Cornell Institution, which has enrolled our countryman, Mr. Goldwin Smith, among its professors, is partly based upon the good later results obtained at Cirencester. About six years ago Mr. Ezra Cornell, of Ithaca, New York, who had made a large fortune by telegraphy, visited the college at Cirencester with Colonel Johnstone. He afterwards made his offer to the New York govern thousand pounds. They were working college opposite line of buildings includes the slaughand farm at a loss, and had not much to say for terhouse, tool and artificial manure house, the results produced. Even the art of ma- office, and blacksmiths' and carpenters' shops, naging the hearty, free-spirited farmers' sons, in which useful lessons may be taken by those accustomed to much outdoor sport and little students who are about to emigrate. Under study, who then came to the college, had yet to the roofs of these buildings are shed-room, be learnt. One day a rat was brought to the straw and hay lofts, and granary. Add to all lecture room of an unpopular professor, let these a roomy rickyard and the residences of loose in lecture time with a sudden slamming the bailiff and tenant, an old student of of every desk, hunted, killed, and thrown in the the college, who took honours there in his professor's face. time, is thoroughly interested in the college work, and goes through his business with all his methods of proceeding open to the daily observation of the students. This gentleman cultivates the five hundred acres on his own Then there was the very troublesome fact of the overdrawn ten thousand. The promoters met to consider whether the college was to be closed as a failure. The result of discussion was that the work of the place lay before it, not the less clear for its early errors and shortcomings. Earl Ducie, Earl Bathurst, Mr. Sotheron Estcourt, and Mr. Edward Holland, who had first offered himself to bear the whole responsibility, became, with Mr. Langston, answerable for all the college debts, and by right of this responsibility, they took upon themselves its management. Upon their personal security upwards of thirty thousand pounds were added to the original subscriptions and donations. These gentlemen now constitute the Council of the College, and under their supervision it has become what it now is, not yet the best conceivable thing of its kind, but the best and most successful agricultural college that has yet been founded anywhere. It stands about a mile out of Cirencester, facing Oakley Park, whose beautiful woods were so familiar to Pope that in his later years he wrote thence to Martha Blount, "You cannot think how melancholy this place makes me. Every part of this wood puts into my mind poor Mr. Gay, with whom I passed once a great deal of pleasant time in it, and another friend, who is near dead, and quite lost to us, Dr. Swift." And he said that he felt in it "the same sort of uneasiness as I find at Twickenham whenever I pass my mother's room." Alas that Pope's melancholy should be perpetuated, for there is talk of placing a new cemetery midway between the town and the college, a cheerful addition to what now is an agreeable promenade. So planted, on high and healthy ground, six hundred feet above the sea level, and with no buildings but its own in sight, the college is as pleasant a place of residence as any one could wish who takes delight in English country air and scenery. The Farmers' College is as rural in all its surroundings as the farmer's occupation. Its massive and roomy farm buildings are a quarter of a mile distant from it. They include a fixed engine of ten-horse power, which works a threshingmill, a pair of stones for bruising or grinding, the chaff and root cutters, and also the pumps. There are the feeding-boxes and cow-house, the chaff and root house, where all material is prepared for the stock, which is lodged close by in yards, and sheds, and styes. The cartstable is so divided that each animal can move about at pleasure, and be fed at the head. An account. Farm management by the collec- Dread feats shall follow, and disasters great, Still cases do come in the natural way for the As to the farm, of its five hundred acres, forty acres are in pasture, the rest arable. The soil, which belongs to the Bath oolitic formation, is composed of clays, marls, limestones, and inferior brash, the last named and least valuable form of soil predominating. But the variations are so frequent that in a furrow of ten chains in length the plough will often pass through soil alternating from brash to rich loam, or it may be to a cold tenacious clay. There are twenty fields, varying in size from ten to fifty acres; two thirds of the land is handy to the farm buildings, the rest scattered, difficult of access, and with an irregular surface, costly therefore to cultivate. These differences of condition, which might vex a farmer who looked only to money profit from the land, are full of interest and information for the student who is well taught to observe. The flock on the farm comprises two hundred and fifty breeding ewes, pure Cotswold; there are twelve milch cows, for the supply of college milk; nine carefully selected horses of the Clydesdale, Suffolk, and West Country breeds, and pigs, pure Berkshire. are winning honours as prize takers. They have among them now, as far as prizes can bear witness to such a fact, the first pig of the These nation. He was the second; but the first is killed and cured, so that he is now without known rival as the great Lord Bacon of the day. We paid a visit to this college a few weeks after the opening of its present session, went through it, dined with the students, and took a lesson with them in the laboratory upon a subject not, we believe, generally popular with the townspeople of Cirencester, water. Our visit was paid on the monthly live-stock market day, perhaps the best of its kind, as to quantity and value of stock, in the West of England. There we found, on one of the hottest baking days of this memorable baking year, in a newly constructed market, some three thousand sheep and oxen unprovided with a drop of water. Provision for water supply not only had formed no part of the architect's arrangement of the market, but seemed to have been disdained as low art. Cirencester itself is content with water from the same bed into which its drainage flows, though an ample supply of good water from the fuller's earth below, is pumped close by, for a canal, and at the service of the town if it will have it. But it won't. When men themselves are content with a little bad water, no wonder that beasts are believed not to require any. While the unfortunate animals in the Cirencester livestock market were panting in the sun, a stream of clear water, the overflow of a lake in the adjacent park, was running along a pipe but a few feet under the surface of the market ground. Somebody had suggested that it would cost little to tap that pipe and put a pump over it. A stone tank had actually been given to receive the water so obtained. But no pump has been placed over the waste water pipe, and we saw close to a flock of thirsty sheep the stone tank contemptuously turned bottom upwards, dry in the dust under a sultry sun. After their day of thirst in the live-stock market, there is no road out of Cirencester that would bring those parched animals to a drinking place within a distance of some miles. A benevolent quaker in the town, merciful to other men's beasts, has done what he could to mitigate this evil by setting up a tank at his own door. But the Agricultural College has wells of its own, and we heard nothing about the town water from its chemical professor. Remote from great cities, the professors of this college must be resident within its walls, and the ample building accordingly supplies rooms to a professor of chemistry and to his assistant; to professors of agriculture, of natural history, and of anatomy, physiology and hygiene, as well as a teacher of drawing, who is a certificated master from South Kensington. The professorship of mathematics and surveying is held by the principal, whose house, once alone on the farm, with walls built as if to stand a cannonade, is the only old part of the building. We found the students very much at home during the quarter of an hour-which did not seem a bad one-before dinner. Each has his own cell, and was hived in it, or buzzing in upon a friend, or joining a small swarm in the library, a comfortable room freely supplied with books of reference and journals. The dinner in hall was plentiful and pleasant, as an English college dinner ought to be, and has a common English feature that will not be copied in the Cornell University, in its brew of college beer. In the United States beer is not given in any place of education, and it is said that no college authority would venture to introduce it. But might not the man be less ready to "liquor up" if the boy had formed wholesome acquaintance with John Barleycorn? After dinner there were the museums to look at. Each professor lectures once a week in the museum itself on the specimens illustrating his subject. A museum, all alive and growing, is to be seen out of doors in the well-stocked botanical garden, with beds set apart for experimenting. The museums are remarkably well furnished with what is necessary for the illustration of the lectures. There is a herbarium containing three thousand specimens of British plants; there is a good series to illustrate geology and mineralogy, with many striking illustrations of the effect of soil or selection of seed upon produce. There is a fine set of wax models of every form of cultivated roots; there are samples of the seed of every plant used in English agriculture, and specimen plants of many varieties of important cereals. The excellent chemical collection also tells its facts to the eye in a striking manner. Thus, one case contains a series of articles of food produced by the farmer, separated into their constituents. Side by side the student sees in substantial bulk the relative proportions of water and of flesh and fat or heat-producing elements, in wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and so forth. The percentage of water thus put for substantial comparison before the eye, looks very striking. A veteran, long past the pulpy time of youth, who gave up in his manhood wine for water, impressed by the fact here shown, has, in his age, left off drinking altogether, on the plea that his bread, meat, and vegetables contain quite as much water as he wants. Another fact that catches the eye immediately concerns another veteran, whom it will not be improper to name, Jack Sprat. Of this person it is said constantly that he could eat no fat. That is a popular delusion. For here is a mass showing how much fat there is in the lean of meat. Jack Sprat may have been himself under a delusion, but the truth is that neither he nor anybody else can eat the lean and not eat fat. But, like the Cirencester market builders, we are forgetting the water. It so happened that on the day of our visit to the college the chemistry of water had been the subject of the chemistry professor's morning lecture, and the custom of the college is for the students to work out for themselves after dinner practically in the laboratory, what they had been taught theoretically in the lecture-room. This is the soundest way of teaching, but not always possible. At the Agricultural College, a spacious airy laboratory, for elementary study, with a laboratory sions. At a dinner of the Royal Agricultural for advanced analyses and a professor's room, have been constructed out of an old barn. It has been thoroughly fitted up, each student has plenty of room for his own operations, and probably there is no place of education in the kingdom with a laboratory more convenient for its pupils, or for the professional analyses made by its chiefs. The work of the day was the analysis of water for organic matter, lime, and so forth. The different ways of testing could be copied into note books from a writing on the wall; the meaning of them was briefly and clearly told by the professor, and all requisite practical directions were at the same time given. Then the students set to work for themselves with their evaporating pans, their retorts and reagents, taking counsel of their teacher whereever they met with any difficulty. So, too, the professor of natural history works at fit time with his students in the open country, and there is, by-the-by, a curious want of uniformity in the surface formation of the country about Cirencester, which makes this region a very convenient one for the out-door study of geology. The professor of agriculture takes his students about the farm. The veterinary professor has his hospital, and a capital series of casts showing the teeth of animals at different ages, preparations of diseased structure, and other delicacies. The principal, who is also professor of mathematics and surveying, goes abroad among his students with chain and theodolite. When a tree is felled in the park he teaches them to estimate the value of its timber. They apply under his direction mathematics to the measuring of haystacks, and at the annual valuation of the farm there is a prize for the valuation by a student which comes nearest to that made professionally. studied has become one of the liberal profes- Great attention is paid to the study of the true values of farm work and produce. At once, upon entering, each student begins farm book-vated brain is, as we said at starting, the best keeping, and has punctually to post up the de- part of a farmer's estate, besides being (in this tails of the college farm. In the second year country) all of it freehold; yet the cost of acthis book-keeping takes a higher form, and be- quiring it bears only a small proportion to the comes a scientific study. A book is given to other costs of a safe start in English farming the student showing among other things the size life. The English farmer cannot rise to the full of every field, the successive crops it has grown, height of the position made for him by the and a minute analysis of the soil. Blank leaves growth of science, until he receives a sound following the description of each field, are then school training, valid in every part, and follows to be filled up with a minute analysis of the it up with a thorough training for his business. form of work done on it, the number of hands, He should read and speak, not Greek and Latin, horses, time and money spent upon each detail but two living languages besides his own, that of its cultivation, and a mathematical reference he may be able to converse freely with farmers of each element in farm work to a fixed stand- from abroad, and profit by their treatises and ard of value. There is so much to be learnt journals. But of the time taken from Latin every day, and such strict testing of the amount and Greek the greater part should be spent in learnt by weekly examinations-of which every a particular cultivation of arithmetic and mastudent sees the result in a list of marks show-thematics, and of the first principles of natural ing him how far he has failed or succeeded in his studies-that a short time at the Farm and College cannot be spent unprofitably by any one who thinks of coaxing bread and meat out of his mother earth. Now here is the difficulty. Agriculture rightly science. Then let him, at the age of sixteen, pass from school to the farm, and for the next year see and share in the work done upon it. So prepared let him go to the Cirencester College and work firmly through the two years' course. If he spend his time well he will learn enough for his purpose, although even It is to the saving up of the Ruffian class by after he has taken his diploma he will feel that the Magistracy and Police-to the conventional the two years' curriculum was all too short. His preserving of them, as if they were Partridges age now will be nineteen. Armed with exact-that their number and audacity must be in scientific knowledge, which he has been taught great part referred. Why is a notorious Thief how to apply to every detail of agriculture, let him proceed to work and watch for himself, during the next two years, on any large well managed farm, taking a salary, perhaps, for the assistance he can give. At the end of that term he has reached the age of one and twenty. It is his own fault then if he be not in his own profession, what his cousin who goes every October to his London hospital will hardly be till a couple of years later in life, a duly qualified practitioner. Their day may be long coming, but of some such sort must be the English farmers of a day to come. DUTY. If thou hast Yesterday thy duty done, And thereby clear'd firm footing for To-day, Whatever clouds make dark To-morrow's sun, Thou shalt not miss thy solitary way. THE RUFFIAN. BY THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. and Ruffian ever left at large? He never turns his liberty to any account but violence and plunder, he never did a day's work out of jail, he never will do a day's work out of jail. As a proved notorious Thief he is always consignable to prison for three months. When he comes out, he is surely as notorious a Thief as he was when he went in. Then send him back again. "Just Heaven!" cries the Society for the protection of remonstrant Ruffians, "This is equivalent to a sentence of perpetual imprisonment!" Precisely for that reason it has my advocacy. I demand to have the Ruffian kept out of my way, and out of the way of all decent people. I demand to have the Ruffian employed, perforce, in hewing wood and drawing water somewhere for the general service, instead of hewing at her Majesty's subjects and drawing their watches out of their pockets. If this be termed an unreasonable demand, then the tax-gatherer's demand on me must be far more unreasonable, and cannot be otherwise than extortionate and unjust. It will be seen that I treat of the Thief and I ENTERTAIN SO strong an objection to the Ruffian as one. I do so, because I know the euphonious softening of Ruffian into Rough, two characters to be one, in the vast majority of which has lately become popular, that I restore cases, just as well as the Police know it. (As the right word to the heading of this paper; to the Magistracy, with a few exceptions, they the rather, as my object is to dwell upon the know nothing about it but what the Police fact that the Ruffian is tolerated among us to choose to tell them.) There are disorderly an extent that goes beyond all unruffianly endur- classes of men who are not thieves; as railwayance. I take the liberty to believe that if navigators, brickmakers, wood-sawyers, costerthe Ruffian besets my life, a professional Ruffian mongers. These classes are often disorderly at large in the open streets of a great city, and troublesome; but it is mostly among themnotoriously having no other calling than that of selves, and at any rate they have their indusRuffian, and of disquieting and despoiling me as trious avocations, they work early and late, and I go peacefully about my lawful business, inter- work hard. The generic Ruffian-honourable fering with no one, then the Government under member for what is tenderly called the Rough which I have the great constitutional privilege, Element-is either a Thief, or the companion supreme honour and happiness, and all the rest of Thieves. When he infamously molests women of it, to exist, breaks down in the discharge of coming out of chapel on Sunday evenings (for any Government's most simple elementary duty. which I would have his back scarified often What did I read in the London daily papers, and deep) it is not only for the gratification in the early days of this last September ? That of his pleasant instincts, but that there may be the Police had" AT LENGTH SUCCEEDED IN CAP-a confusion raised by which either he or his TURING TWO OF THE NOTORIOUS GANG THAT friends may profit, in the commission of highway HAVE SO LONG INFESTED THE WATERLOO-ROAD." Is it possible? What a wonderful Police! Here is a straight, broad, public thoroughfare of immense resort; half a mile long; gas-lighted by night; with a great gas-lighted railway station in it, extra the street lamps; full of shops; traversed by two popular cross thoroughfares of considerable traffic; itself the main road to the South of London; and the admirable Police have, after long infestment of this dark and lonely spot by a gang of Ruffians, actually got hold of two of them. Why, can it be doubted that any man of fair London knowledge and common resolution, armed with the powers of the Law, could have captured the whole confederacy in a week? robberies or in picking pockets. When he gets a police-constable down and kicks him helpless for life, it is because that constable once did his duty in bringing him to justice. When he rushes into the bar of a public-house and scoops an eye out of one of the company there, or bites his ear off, it is because the man he maims gave evidence against him. When he and a line of comrades extending across the footway-say of that solitary mountain-spur of the Abruzzi, the Waterloo Road-advance towards me, "skylarking" among themselves, my purse or shirt pin is in predestined peril from his playfulness. Always a Ruffian, always a Thief. Always a Thief, always a Rullian. Now, when I, who am not paid to know these |