A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



with man s destiny were suspended until the hay 

 was in. He had no time to go to the village, 

 and my letters had to wait. When he explained 

 to me that he had twenty acres of timothy stand 

 ing and couldn t get any help to &quot;throw it down,&quot; 

 I asked him in a moment of reckless bravado why 

 he did not hire me to help him. &quot; What do you 

 pay anyway ? &quot; 



&quot; Dollern half a day. Did you ever cut grass ? &quot; 



I thought a moment. I could not remember 

 that I ever did. In fact, I could not remember 

 that I had ever cut anything but a few coupons 

 and some disagreeable friends, neither of which 

 operations requires a machine. I told him I 

 thought that any smart man could manage to get 

 through a day of it on a pinch, now that it had 

 been reduced to mechanism. 



&quot;You might work the raker,&quot; he said doubt 

 fully. &quot; That would save Griselle. She wants 

 to do up her cherries.&quot; 



I can safely and graciously write about haying 

 time now from my safe outlook. These things 

 get some kind of aura from the distance (you can 

 put that quotation about the loan of enchantment 

 to the view in here, if you know who said it I 

 don t). I m afraid that the felicities of agricul 

 ture are like those problem plays we read about, 

 and acquire beauty according to the square of the 

 distance. Perhaps my heroism was very much 

 like that of the bridge-jumper, but I really 

 thought at the time that the feat of manual labour 

 and the earning of a &quot; dollern a half&quot; would ele- 



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