The other day I paid a visit to Kessingland. Here
I found that Bayfield, with the aid of a labouring man
who has been employed in the ditch-digging and draining,
has finished preparing the piece of ground that was
occupied by a border, a stunted fence, and a little grup —
as we call a small ditch in East Anglia — in which a
drain has now been laid to take the water, to be sown
next spring as an addition to the Front lawn. Although
it seemed flat enough, this breadth took about forty loads
of soil to make it level, which luckily were provided by
the top spit of the stuff taken from the new ditch. In



DECEMBER 393

the result the improvement is, or will be, great, and the
scrubby bushes of Privet, &c., from the fence have most
of them been replanted upon the cliff face.
The amount of soil that will come out of a small
space is really wonderful ; thus that excavated in widening
and adding to the field ditch in question, and the digging
of a soakage hole, amounted to over two hundred and
fifty loads, which have been spread about the meadow,
or, when it was too clayey to be of service there, dumped
into the old marl-pit in its centre. On this Front tennis-
lawn the turf has been lifted where it was depressed and
relaid after placing soil beneath it, with the result that
the ground is now much more level than it has been.
