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But I looked in vain for any Maud Mullers in the meadows, and have concluded that these can be found only in New England hay-fields! And herein is one of the first surprises that await one on visiting the Old World countries, the absence of graceful, girlish figures, and bright girlish faces, among the peasantry or rural population.

For the first time in Lou's life a panic seized her, a desperate longing to run away. She opened her eyes and looked across the hay-fields to where that tall, stalwart figure worked beside the two smaller ones. Even from that distance he looked different, somehow; he wasn't the same Jim.

We still rowed on after this, Ellen taking the sculls in my boat; we passed a weir a little higher up, and about three miles beyond it came by moonlight again to a little town, where we slept at a house thinly inhabited, as its folk were mostly tented in the hay-fields.

In the half-cut hay-fields the machines stood at rest; rarely, an interlaced couple could be dimly seen for a moment on some distant footpath of the park; sometimes a partridge called or a jay screamed; otherwise a Sabbath stillness as it seemed to Marcia, a Sabbath dreariness held the scene. Newbury put up his arms, drew her down to him, and kissed her passionately.

These big members of the party were human enough to look around as the children scrambled into the surrey, and then prick up their ears as if they knew the difference between a picnic and a plough, and were happy accordingly. They trotted down the turnpike a mile, and then turned into a cross-road bordered by hay-fields almost ready for cutting.

In the summer-time, when I used to think of the Nesbitts and the McIntyres in the sweet-smelling hay-fields, and of the bairns gathering berries in the woods, my heart was like to die within me. It is not so bad now since you came. No, Effie, I am quite content now."

The pier was to be three miles long, and the Berkeley hills were denuded of whole groves of mature eucalyptus for the piling. At the same time that his electric roads were building out through the hills, the hay-fields were being surveyed and broken up into city squares, with here and there, according to best modern methods, winding boulevards and strips of park.

The mountain pastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep hills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countless sheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut and abandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming with honeysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fat cattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built Morgans wallowing in it up to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full bellies, by ten in the morning.

How she had dreamed of the gallant young hero who was to come to her some day. She had wondered how she would know him, and what were the words he first would say! If he would come riding by, as the judge did when "Maud Muller stood in the hay-fields;" and she remembered, too, the story of "Rebecca at the Well."

It was a perfect summer morning and I enjoyed my walk over the familiar road and up into the hill country. The birds seemed to sing a welcome to me. Men and boys I had known waved their hats in the hay-fields and looked at me. There are few pleasures in this world like that of a boy getting home after a long absence.