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"What do you want, youngster?" demanded the man sharply. He was in a hurry and it was obvious that something had nettled him and that he was in no humor to be delayed. "I came to help with the haying." "We don't want any boys as young as you," Stevens returned, moving away. "I've a card from Mr. Wharton." "A card, eh? Why didn't you say so in the first place? Shell it out."
Walden was thrifty and could afford to wear a broadcloth blue coat with bright brass buttons on grand occasions, and that Mrs. Walden was warranted in having a satin gown. Haying was over. The rye was reaped, the wheat and oats were harvested, and the flax was pulled. September had come, the time when Mr. Walden usually went to Boston with the cheese.
Treat wanted help during the haying and harvesting season, and offered employment to the boy, who was already strong enough to do almost as much as a man; for James already had a good reputation as a faithful worker. "Whatever his hands found to do, he did it with his might," and he was by no means fastidious as to the kind of work, provided it was honest and honorable.
He looked a long time, thinking that perhaps they had gotten loose from the prongs and would come down afterwards, but never a handle came. They must be having haying time, the folks in the sky, to use so many forks, he decided, and the sun must be shining for them, way up above the clouds, or they wouldn't have haying weather.
He never had bought himself a rougher suit of clothes or a coarse hat for haying, but his discarded Sunday best in various states of decadence served him for barn and field. It was proverbial that a silk hat lasted him five years for best and ten for common; but whatever he might be doing, Israel Haydon always preserved an air of unmistakable dignity.
Farmer Harrow, who used to work at haying on Sunday, said it was worth a bushel of turnips any time to hear such sweet singing. So his hired man and horses had rest one day in seven, and he became a better man.
The sun was pouring down upon the wiltering foliage with a fierceness which had set the insect world droning its drowsy melody; the earth was already parching; the sloughs were already dry, and the tall grass therein was rapidly ripening against the season of haying.
He has little time for the poetry of haying, as he struggles along, filling the air with the wet mass which he shakes over his head, and picking his way with short legs and bare feet amid the short and freshly cut stubble. But if the scythes cut well and swing merrily, it is due to the boy who turned the grindstone.
One of the most influential of the motives that brought the early settlers to these shores, apart from that natural instinct to scatter and multiply which urges even sober salmon to climb the Rocky Mountains, was their desire to find a country at once fertile and winterless, where their flocks and herds could find pasture all the year, thus doing away with the long and tiresome period of haying and feeding necessary in the eastern and old western States and Territories.
There is a tradition that a summer visitor once hired a "shay," and drove, all by herself, up to Horn o' the Moon, drawn on by the elusive splendor of its name. But she met such a dissuading flood of comment by the way as to startle her into the state of mind commonly associated with the Gully Road. Farmers, haying in the field, came forward, to lean on the fence, and call excitedly,
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