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Updated: May 1, 2025
The stackers wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting for our amusement. The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to the top where the men were stationed, one behind the other, and to have them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laughing to see us emerge from our golden cover.
Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it seemed to us! Mother and Mrs.
Then the team and rack on the smooth-cut meadow and Bill on the load, and John and I pitching on; and the talk and badinage that goes on, the excitement over disturbed field mice, the discussion of the best methods of killing woodchucks, tales of marvellous exploits of loaders and stackers, thrilling incidents of the wet year of '98 when two men and one team saved four acres of hay by working all night "with lanterns, I jing" much talk of how she goes on, "she" being the hay, and no end of observations upon the character, accomplishments, faults, and excesses of the sedate old horses waiting comfortably out in front, half hidden by the mountain of hay above them and nibbling at the tumbles as they go by.
The house now boasted six rooms; the barn and stock-sheds had at a distance the appearance of a town in themselves; the collection of haying implements mowers, loaders, stackers was almost complete enough to stock a jobbing house.
The mere names of scores of modern instruments of farming, all unknown in Civil War days hay carriers, hay loaders, hay stackers, manure spreaders, horse corn planters, corn drills, disk harrows, disk ploughs, steam ploughs, tractors, and the like give some suggestion of the extent to which America has made mechanical the most ancient of occupations.
The feeder, his face gray with dust, rolled the grain into the cylinder so even, so steady, so swift that it ran on with a sullen, booming roar. Far up on the straw pile the stackers worked with the steady, rhythmic action of men rowing a boat, their figures looming vague and dim in the flying dust and chaff, outlined against the glorious yellow and orange-tinted clouds.
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