A Rural Craft The counties have much to teach one
another. Earlier this year I was much struck by the perfection of the art of hedge-laying which flourishes in new vigour in Leicestershire and parts of East Anglia. Not long since, in a competition in Hertfordshire, several of the competitors had made their own " mollies " (mallets) on the almost prehistoric model out of hedgerow timber. Now in Wiltshire I heard a lament that hedges were being destroyed, not renovated, because they were just shorn, espe- cially along the road-side, and not laid, because the art of laying or layer- ing had been half forgotten. In some places the horrible system is practised of associating a strand of barbed wire with the perishing and abbreviated hedge. Hedges indeed, which are of the very tissue of rural England, are at a crisis of their existence. They are even being abused—as a poor alternative to wire—by some of our agricultural critics, who think in terms of corn, not of stock.
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