DANVIS FARM LIFE 79 



The wool buyer makes his rounds, and the boys 

 come to see the shearing, to get in everybody's 

 way, and beg cuts of sheep-twine. The farmhouse 

 affords its best for the shearing dinner, which has 

 long been an honored festival in New England. 



But the cheap wool-growing of the great West 

 has well-nigh put an end to this industry here. 

 Flocks have become few and small, and herds 

 of Alderneys or shorthorns feed where formerly 

 great flocks of Merinos nibbled the clover. Shep- 

 herds have turned dairymen. Those who practice 

 the shearers' craft year by year become scarcer, 

 and the day seems not far off when this once great 

 event of our year will live only in the memory of 

 old men. 



The silvery green of the rye-fields, and the 

 darker green of the winter wheat, and the purple 

 bloom of the herds' grass, grow billowy under the 

 soft winds of July with waves that bear presage 

 of harvesting and haymaking. 



In fields red and white with clover and daisy, 

 the strawberries have ripened, and have drawn a 

 flavor, the essence of wildness, from the free 

 clouds that shadowed them, from the songs of the 

 bobolinks and meadowlarks that hovered over 

 them, from bumble-bee and skimming swallow, 

 from the near presence of the nightly prowling 

 fox — a flavor that no garden fruit possesses. To 

 pick these is not so much a labor as a pastime for 



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