an to Barn 



ways rye in those early days, and happy was the 

 farmer who found that it threshed more than six 

 bushels to the hundred sheaves. Men were 

 gauged in those days by the rye standard, or by 

 their capacity to withstand the subtle, ultimate 

 outcome of the orchard. Occasionally there was 

 a giant among them. I remember one who, in 

 his prime, could in each hand lift by its throat 

 a bag containing two bushels of rye, and carry 

 them up a flight of stairs ; and once, at least, he 

 lifted a full barrel of cider by the chimes, and drank 

 from the bung. 



I take it this old barn saw its merriest days, or 

 nights, when there were "husking bees," some- 

 thing unknown to the later generations, and, too, 

 the dances that followed, when the broad thresh- 

 ing floor was cleared. There may have been a 

 lack of grace and a heaviness of step that would 

 distract a modern parlor knight, but there was a 

 wholesome heartiness that made amends for such 

 little deficiencies as I have mentioned. Not a 

 phase of primitive farm-life but some feature of 

 the old barn recalled. Nor was this all. Nature 

 had taken possession, since all human care had 

 ceased, and to see how the old structure was util- 

 ized by varied forms of animal and plant life was, 

 to me, of even greater than its merely human or 

 historic interest. Scarcely a nook or corner but 

 was the home of at least spiders and those curious 

 mason wasps that build such strange nests and 

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