The implements used in agricultural operations seem to be ruder, and far more inefficient, than among us. The plough is precisely such an instrument as I recollect to have seen represented in my Delphin edition of Virgil's _Georgics_ when I was at school; and it is drawn indifferently by horses, bullocks, or heifers. Bullocks and heifers are, however, more commonly used than horses, though it is no unusual sight to see a horse and a heifer yoked together. There is no boy to drive; but the ploughman, as in Scotland, at once holds the stilts of the plough, and with his voice, and a long halter, guides the cattle. With respect to the harrows, I saw little difference between them and our English implements, except that those in Germany are lighter, and never have more than one horse or one bullock attached to them.
The rest of their tools, such as forks, rakes, mattocks, spades, &c., very much resemble our own; with this difference, in reference to the last, that in Germany much less iron is wasted upon them than upon similar articles in England. The blade of a German spade, which, by the way, is pointed, or, rather, semicircular in form, is composed of wood to within a few inches of the edge, and there is no iron at all upon the handle.
I am not quite sure that I perfectly understood my intelligent companion, when we came to discuss the amount of crop raised from the land, and the prices fetched by the different kinds of grain in the market. His method of computing these matters was so different from any to which I had been accustomed, that I could only guess at a parallel between it and our English measures. Yet it struck me that he described the wheat lands as producing, on an average, between three and four quarters; of which the price varied from twenty-one to twenty-five shillings of our money. Concerning the price of the rye I had less curiosity, though that seemed to repay the farmer quite as abundantly as wheat; at least, my friend assured me that it would not answer his purpose to substitute wheat for rye, even now, when wheat was more than usually in demand, and therefore fetched a more than usually high price. For it is worthy of remark that the failure of the crops in America had affected the corn-market even in Bohemia; from which remote district people were transmitting quantities of wheat to supply the necessities of the squatters among the back woods of Kentucky.