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Yes, of all occupations in this world, making hay! It was a very confined patch of churchyard lying between Gracechurch-street and the Tower, capable of yielding, say an apronful of hay. By what means the old old man and woman had got into it, with an almost toothless hay-making rake, I could not fathom.
All this place was full of working, and the men sang and spoke at their work in German, which I could not understand. I did indeed find one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who knew a little French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to teach me German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates of the old town and then I left him.
"If the nor'west holds till to-morrow we shall begin," he announces. But next day the wind had backed afresh, and the cheerful clouds of yesterday, now torn and shapeless, straggling in disorderly rout, seemed to be fleeing like the wreckage of a broken army. Madame Chapdelaine foretold inevitable misfortune. "Mark my words, we shall not have good hay-making weather.
The climate of the islands and shores of the mainland is remarkably bland and temperate and free from extremes of either heat or cold throughout the year. It is rainy, however, so much so that hay-making will hardly ever be extensively engaged in here, whatever the future may show in the way of the development of mines, forests, and fisheries.
In the warm dry hay-making weather this open-air worship was very pleasant, the flowers in the grass and the roses in the little plots about the tombs giving colour and sweet odours, while the swallows glided gracefully overhead and sometimes a blackbird whistled. The bees, moreover, interfered with the baptisms, and even caused several marriages to be postponed.
What he thought of was the violets and daffodils, and fresh grass and sprouting shrubs, the young lambs in the field, and the warbling larks in the air. No doubt, the little boy's heart was heavy when he was lifted from the coach, and went back into the palace. How much happier he might have been if he had been one of the children he had seen hay-making at Saint Cloud, the year before!
At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger children with their governess. The countess presided over the usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-making peasants.
In the spacious kitchen of Doctor Morani were assembled a body of young rosy lasses in laced bodices, and short, bright-colored petticoats, come down from the neighboring mountains for the olive-gathering, much as Irish laborers cross over to England for the hay-making season.
It and the fields were happy in the animating harvest toil. Men with harvesters' hats, women with sunbonnets, cracked their rustic jokes, laughed, and sang at their labor; Mavis cooked food, filled the big white bobs with beer, sent out bannocks and tin bottles of tea; Dale's children had rakes and played at hay-making. Only the master, the husband, the father, was unhappy.
"Then, dear Kate," said Frances, earnestly, "will you promise to tell me all about the next stations, and the green fields, and the sheep, and the cows, and the people hay-making, and the dear little white houses. And I will dream about the sea. Oh, I am so glad that you and I are going to the sea."
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