CLIMATE, SEASONS, ETC. 



1817. 



July 24. The main part of the wheat, &c. is put into Barns, 

 which are very large and commodious. Some they 

 put into small ricks, or stacks, out in the fields, and 

 there they stand, zvithout any thatching, till they are 

 wanted to be taken in during the winter, and, some 

 times they remain out for a whole year. Nothing 

 can prove more clearly than this fact, the jreat 

 difference between this climate and that of England, 

 where, as every body knows, such stacks would be 

 mere heaps of muck by January, if they were not, 

 long and long before that time, carried clean of 

 the farm by the wind. The crop is sometimes 

 threshed out in the field by the feet of horses, as in 

 the South of France. It is sometimes carried into 

 the barn s floor, where three or four horses, or oxen, 

 going abreast, trample out the grain as the sheaves, 

 or swarths, are brought in. And this explains to 

 us the humane precept of MOSES, &quot; not to muzzle 

 the ox as he treadeth out the grain,&quot; which we country 

 people in England cannot make out. I used to be 

 puzzled, too, in the story of RUTH, to imagine how 

 BOAZ could be busy amongst his threshers in the 

 height of harvest. The weather is so fine, and the 

 grain so dry, that, when the wheat and rye are 

 threshed by the flail, the sheaves are barely untied, 

 laid upon the floor, receive a few raps, and are then 

 tied up, clean threshed for straw, without the order 

 of the straws being in the least changed ! The ears 

 and butts retain their places in the sheaf, and the 

 band that tied the sheaf before ties it again. The 

 straw is as bright as burnished gold. Not a speck 

 in it. These facts will speak volumes to an English 

 farmer, who will see with what ease work must be 

 done in such a country. 



25. Fine hot day. Early peas, mentioned before, 

 harvested, in forty days from the sowing. Not 

 more flies than in England. 



26. Fine broiling day. The Indian Corn grows away 

 now, and has, each plant, at least a tumbler full of 

 water standing in the sockets of its leaves, while the 

 sun seems as if it would actually burn one. Yet 

 we have a breeze / and, under these fine shady 

 Walnuts and Locusts and Oaks, and on the fine grass 

 beneath, it is very pleasant. Woodcocks begin to 

 come very thick about. 



27. Fine broiler again. Some friends from England 

 here to-day. We spent a pleasant day ; drank 

 success^to the Debt,[and destruction to the Borough- 



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