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 
