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When the grass grew again, the neighbor did not appear with his scythe; but one morning I found the cow tethered on the sward, hitched near the clothes-horse, a short distance from the house. This seemed to be the man's idea of the best way to cut the grass.

It occurred to me that our men were reserving fire according to the Skobeleff plan. In this I was right. When the Turks were within a hundred yards of the trenches the defenders fired as one man. The front ranks of the enemy fell like corn before the scythe; those in rear charged with irresistible impetuosity over their dead comrades. But the Russians had anticipated such an event.

It was the heaviest and finest crop of oats that I ever saw, and they stood full six feet high in the straw. I was sitting on horseback, looking on while they were mowing them, and I recollect that when Thomas Airs, one of the mowers, who was full six feet high, swept his scythe into the standing corn, the ears of the oats frequently struck his hat as he walked along.

Whether that tribe be the Eskimo of the Northern ice-sheet or the Terra del Fuegian of the Southern, the Hawaiian of the islands of the Pacific or the Aymarás of the Amazon, all fall like grain before the scythe under the attack of a malady which is little more than the proverbial "little 'oliday" of three days in bed to civilized man.

These contests had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy scythe. Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was spent on the new land. Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover quaveringly called.

Those same Carpathian Mountains, which form the natural boundary between the land of the Magyars and the Russian plains, take a sudden turn westward at the Rumanian frontier, then sweep around in a great semicircle, forming a shape resembling a scythe, the handle of which reaches up into Poland, the blade curling around within the Balkan Peninsula.

Ere Edward could make his way among the Highlanders, who, furious and eager for spoil, now thronged upon each other, he saw his former commander brought from his horse by the blow of a scythe, and beheld him receive, while on the ground, more wounds than would have let out twenty lives. When Waverley came up, however, perception had not entirely fled.

The men in that room were Yankees, with a sense of humor as keen as a new bush scythe. The Squire sat back and wiped his spectacles and beamed on their laughter. Then he read on down the column, through the biting satire to the bitter end, having an audience whose hilarity would have delighted a vaudeville performer's soul.

"Better," thought Don Silverio, with tormenting self-reproach, "better have left him to his plough, to his scythe, to his reaping-hook; better have left him in ignorance of the meaning of art and of study; better have left him a mere peasant to beget peasants like himself.

Gilbert, left almost without a companion for the good priest Herman, whose time was divided between his pastoral duties, his prayers, and his studies, saw him but at intervals found time to hang very heavily upon his hands. He thought the old reaper weary and sluggish, for the scythe flies fast only when we employ or enjoy the moments.