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It was a grand sight, he said, to stand on the jutting spurs of this great ravine, and look down upon the tops of the trees that lay below, tossing their rounded heads like the waves of a big sea. There were many lovely flowers, vetches of several kinds, blue, white, and pencilled, twining among the grass.
Then threshing time and ploughing again. All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the same. You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out; and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans about the hills. The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.
Weather is really a serious matter to gentlemen who are interested in beans and vetches, wheat and hay. You hang your happiness upon the changes of the moon!" "As you upon the smiles of a minister. The weather of a court is more capricious than that of the skies, at least we are better husbandmen than you who sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."
Again, I can show that the carcasses of birds, when floating on the sea, sometimes escape being immediately devoured; and seeds of many kinds in the crops of floating birds long retain their vitality: peas and vetches, for instance, are killed by even a few days' immersion in sea-water; but some taken out of the crop of a pigeon, which had floated on artificial salt-water for 30 days, to my surprise nearly all germinated.
Were the soil only tolerably good, so that oats, vetches, turnips and mangel wurtzel could be grown on virgin land without manure, beasts might be stall-fed, the manure doubled by that method, and a profit made on the animals. English or Australian sheep have hitherto been untried for what reason I cannot imagine, unless from the expense of their prime cost, which is about two pounds per head.
About midway between Fort Ellice and Carlton a sudden and well-defined change occurs in the character of the country; the light soil disappears, and its place is succeeded by a rich dark loam covered deep in grass and vetches.
"Here, you see," he went on, opening one of the bins and taking from it a handful of freshly cut vetches, and going to the door and throwing it down before the gazelles, "this is their special food; it is brought in fresh every morning from our farm, which lies six miles away. The next bin contains the seed for the waterfowl. It is all mixed here, you see. Wheat and peas and pulse and other seeds.
It was the man's splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her. Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping stones of the terrace.
Generally in California, such a crop can be most conveniently grown during the rainy season, but in some parts of the State where irrigation water is available, a summer growth can be procured with very satisfactory results; so that we are now growing in California both wintergrowing legumes, like field peas, vetches, burr clover, etc., which are hardy enough to grow in spite of the light frosts which may prevail, and are also growing summer legumes which thrive under high temperature, like cowpeas and other members of the bean family, and for which water can be spared without injury to the fruit trees which share the application of the land with them.
Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these things come not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass. Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet lady's bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-bush.
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