THE TIMOTHY HARVEST 231 



no more time. Promptly at nine he was called 

 in, and there was to be no more cutting that 

 day. At eleven o'clock the tedder was started, 

 and in two hours the cut grass had been turned. 

 At three o'clock the rake gathered it into wind- 

 rows, from which it was rolled and piled into 

 heaps, or cocks, of six hundred or eight hundred 

 pounds each. The cutting of the morning was 

 in safe bunches before the dew fell, there to go 

 through the process of sweating until ten o'clock 

 the next day. It was then opened and fluffed 

 out for four hours, after which all hands and all 

 teams turned to and hauled it into the forage 

 barn. 



The grass that was cut one morning was safely 

 housed as hay by the second night, if the weather 

 was favorable ; if not, it took little harm in the 

 haycocks, even from foul weather. It is the sun- 

 bleach that takes the life out of hay. 



This year we had no trouble in getting fifty 

 tons of as fine timothy hay as horses could wish 

 to eat or man could wish to see. We began to 

 cut on Tuesday, the 6th of July, and by Saturday 

 evening the twenty-acre crop was under cover. 

 The boys blistered their hands with the fork 

 handles, and their faces, necks, and arms with 

 the sun's rays, and claimed to like the work and 

 the blisters. Indeed, tossing clean, fragrant hay 

 is work fit for a prince ; and a man never looks 

 to better advantage or more picturesque than 

 when, redolent with its perfume, he slings a jug 



