United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the autumn my whole time was devoted to shooting, chiefly at Woodhouse and Maer, and sometimes with young Eyton of Eyton. Upon the whole the three years which I spent at Cambridge were the most joyful in my happy life; for I was then in excellent health, and almost always in high spirits.
In the summer the whole family used often to sit on the steps of the old portico, with the flower-garden in front, and with the steep wooded bank opposite the house reflected in the lake, with here and there a fish rising or a water-bird paddling about. Nothing has left a more vivid picture on my mind than these evenings at Maer.
To hear of praise from an eminent person, though no doubt apt or certain to excite vanity, is, I think, good for a young man, as it helps to keep him in the right course. My visits to Maer during these two or three succeeding years were quite delightful, independently of the autumnal shooting.
Immediately beneath the layer of red sand, the original substratum of black sandy peat extended. A grass field, likewise not far from Maer Hall, had formerly been thickly covered with marl, and was then left for several years as pasture; it was afterwards ploughed.
It is a dialect of language first made known to us through the Voyage of the Fly, as spoken in the islands Erroob, Maer, and Massied. Admitting this, we collate it with the North Australian tongues, and that, for the sake of contrast rather than comparison.
This apparent sinking of superficial bodies is due, as was first suggested to me by Mr. Wedgwood of Maer Hall in Staffordshire, to the large quantity of fine earth continually brought up to the surface by worms in the form of castings. These castings are sooner or later spread out and cover up any object left on the surface.
But the burrows are sometimes much more numerous, for when digging in a grass-field near Maer Hall, I found a cake of dry earth, as large as my two open hands, which was penetrated by seven burrows, as large as goose-quills. Weight of the earth ejected from a single burrow, and from all the burrows within a given space.
The accumulation of mould during 14.75 years on the surface of a dry, sandy, grass-field near Maer Hall, amounted to 2.2 inches in 10 years. The accumulation during 21.5 years on a swampy field near Maer Hall, amounted to nearly 1.9 inch in 10 years. The accumulation during 7 years on a very swampy field near Maer Hall amounted to 2.1 inches in 10 years.
My zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting-boots open by my bed-side when I went to bed, so as not to lose half a minute in putting them on in the morning; and on one occasion I reached a distant part of the Maer estate, on the 20th of August for black-game shooting, before I could see: I then toiled on with the game-keeper the whole day through thick heath and young Scotch firs.
I visited Barmouth to see some Cambridge friends who were reading there, and thence returned to Shrewsbury and to Maer for shooting; for at that time I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science.
Word Of The Day