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Updated: June 22, 2025
As summer advances turf-cutting and hay-making begins; while the autumn months are principally devoted to the repairing of their houses, manuring the grass lands, and killing and curing of sheep for exportation, as well as for their own use during the winter.
Notwithstanding they began to feel the effects of war and to suffer some privations, in consequence of the rise of price in provisions, caused by the increase of taxation, they had yet a barrel of good beer to go to in hay-making and harvest time, and the young men at least could gain a comfortable subsistence of the necessaries of life by their daily labour.
'It is a long time since I have seen you, said he, at last. 'An unheard-of time. 'Still longer since we have had any conversation. 'I was just thinking so. Not since that hot hay-making, when Guy came home. Indeed, we have had so much amusement lately that I have hardly had time for thought. Guy says we are all growing dissipated.
Hay-making is a really beautiful process: the clicking mower cutting its clean, wide swath, a man stepping after, where the hay is very heavy, to throw the windrow back a little. Then, after lying to wilt and dry in the burning sun all full of good odours the horse-rake draws it neatly into wide billows, and after that, John, the Pole, and I roll the billows into tumbles.
The holiday outings I gave my men were a quid pro quo for some hours of overtime in the hay-making, and included a day's wages, all expenses, and a supply of food. They generally went to a large town where an agricultural show was in progress, but I think the sea trips to Ilfracombe and Weston-super-Mare were the most popular, offering as they did much greater novelty.
It contained some eighty acres, part of which was woodland, and there were always trees to be chopped. Hay-making, also, was an equally severe test of bodily strength, and to pitch hay brought every muscle into use. There, too, he had water sports, but he always preferred rowing to sailing, which was too slow and inactive an exercise for him.
Gradually the truth dawned upon her; and she burst into tears over an old rake which she had been accustomed to call hers, because she had always dragged it at hay-making. Then wiping her eyes hastily for, partly from her aunt's hardness, she never could bear to be seen crying, even when a child she fled to Brownie's stall, and burying herself in the manger, began weeping afresh.
As on the occasion of her first engagement Joanna had made difficulties with the shearing and hay-making, so now Albert contrived and shifted in his anxiety to fit in his marriage with other plans. He had, it appeared, as far back as last Christmas, arranged for a week's tour in August with the Polytechnic to Lovely Lucerne.
The mere possession titillates; and although the contents may be most exemplary to the eye, the mind is apt to go hay-making between the lines and no offense intended. All the fatuousness that had led me astray to the lure of her blue eyes, upon the train and in hollow Benton, surged anew now perhaps seasoned to present taste by my peppery defiance of Daniel.
To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and softcymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
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