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I found my seed-bag hanging, dusty, over a rafter in the shed, and Harriet sewed a buckle on the strip that goes around the waist. I cleaned and sharpened my hoe. "Now," I said to myself, "give me a good day and I am ready to plant." The sun was just coming up on Friday, looking over the trees into a world of misty and odorous freshness.

She got down and lay flat on her back, with her head on the seed-bag, to watch the flock, high above her, speeding northward to the lakes, their leader crying commands to the gray company that flew in V-shaped order behind him.

Knowing well how much a child is gratified by being permitted to imitate a man's work, he sometimes hung the seed-bag, with a few handfuls in it, upon my shoulder, and sent me into the field to sow. I contrived in some way to throw the grain away, and it fell among the clods.

In the whole of Hesse, Meiningen, and other districts, people eat pea-soup with dried pig-ribs on Ash Wednesday or Candlemas. The ribs are then collected and hung in the room till sowing-time, when they are inserted in the sown field or in the seed-bag amongst the flax seed. This is thought to be an infallible specific against earth-fleas and moles, and to cause the flax to grow well and tall.

As Louisa was putting her hand into the seed-bag, to take out of it the afternoon food for her birds, she found a paper, on which were written these words: "The inhabitants of the air fly towards thee, O Lord! and thou givest them their food; thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness."

There were innumerable stamps of baked clay, which were buried in the earth to show any one who might dispute the limits, how far each grave extended, images of the gods, which were laid in the sand to purify and sanctify it for by nature it belonged to Seth-Typhon as well as the figures called Schebti, which were either enclosed several together in little boxes, or laid separately in the grave; it was supposed that they would help the dead to till the fields of the blessed with the pick-axe, plough, and seed-bag which they carried on their shoulders.

A little later she climbed the bluff to the corn-field, making a diligent search for Indian arrowheads all the way. When she reached the seed-bag again, she threw the string over her head and started up a row determinedly. For a rod or more she did not pause either to be polite or to scare away gophers, but hurried along very fast, with her eyes to the ground.

Altogether, this "Autumn" fountain is probably the finest of the four. Winter. The central figure is Nature, in the nakedness of winter, resting after the harvests of autumn and waiting for the birth of spring. At one side a man with a spade rests, while on the other a man with a seed-bag is already beginning to sow.

The bag upon which the figure 8 is placed, indicates the fable of the sower, it is the seed-bag of the husbandman; the boat alludes to the passage of the Lake when the Saviour quelled the storm.

As the sun rose higher the mists stole secretly away, first toward the lower brook-hollows, finally disappearing entirely; the morning coolness passed, the tops of the furrows dried out to a lighter brown, and still I followed the long planting. At each return I refilled my seed-bag, and sometimes I drank from the jug of water which I had hidden in the grass.