PHASES OF FARM LIFE. 261 



race before long. It is a great ignominy to be mowed 

 out of your swath. Hay gathering is clean, manly 

 work all through. Young fellows work in haying 1 

 who do not do another stroke on the farm the whole 

 year. It is a gymnasium in the meadows and under 

 the summer sky. How full of pictures, too ! the 

 smooth slopes dotted with cocks with lengthening 

 shadows ; the great, broad-backed, soft-cheeked loads, 

 moving along the lanes and brushing under the trees ; 

 the unfinished stack with forkfuls of hay being handed 

 up its sides to the builder, and when finished the 

 shape of a great pear, with a pole in the top for the 

 stem. May be in the fall and winter the calves and 

 yearlings will hover around it and gnaw its base until 

 it overhangs them and shelters them from the storm. 

 Or the farmer will "fodder" his cows there, one 

 of the most picturesque scenes to be witnessed on the 

 farm, twenty or thirty or forty milchers filing along 

 toward the stack in the field, or clustered about it, 

 waiting the promised bite. In great, green flakes the 

 hay is rolled off, and distributed about in small heaps 

 upon the unspotted snow. After the cattle have eaten, 

 the birds snow-buntings and red-polls come and 

 pick up the crumbs, the seeds of the grasses and 

 weeds. At night the fox and the owl come for mice. 

 What a beautiful path the cows make through the 

 snow to the stack or to the spring under the hill ! 

 always more or less wayward, but broad and firm, 

 and carved and indented by a multitude of rounded 

 hoofs. 



