THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 245 



young Yulcan, but she danced with him one day so 

 much that her swelled legs did not allow of her being 

 mounted for some time again. Having, moreover, per- 

 suaded him and some other youngsters upon the farm, 

 who make an eixtra shilling or two now and then, to 

 insure their lives so as to receive 100^. when they come 

 to be fifty years of age, that sum in the event of their 

 dying sooner being paid to their relatives, I thought it 

 might be hard upon the insurance office if he continued 

 his horse-taming, so I gave orders to desist, getting 

 myself now too old to encounter a steed in fight for 

 mastery, which might some day have been a necessity 

 if I had resumed her services as an afternoon hack. 



We have been busy getting fresh water mussels off 

 the gravel bed beneath the house for a distant friend's 

 aquarium. The mother-of-pearl lining of their shells is 

 beautiful. I am tempted to keep a few, in the hopes 

 of obtaining British pearls, if the naturalist's theory 

 be correct that a pearl is only an accumulation of mat- 

 ter thrown out by the fish, a sort of gummy tear-drop to 

 relieve itself of the irritation caused by an extraneous 

 substance within its house or eye. He saj^s that if a 

 pearl be split there is generally sand, or something 

 within. Will any lady try her chaplet and see ? 



How exquisitely graduated is the supply of nature ! 

 How gentle is the preparation of the air for the soaking 

 that our thirsty earth desires, and which it will have 

 ere long ! Following hot, scorching days, that made 

 our hay almost before we knew it, there has succeeded 

 a. delicious coolness of superincumbent atmosphere that 

 is grateful as fanning to the feverish cheek. And just 

 the slightest dusting of fine rain hath occurred, as it 

 were, to break the fierceness of thirst, and prevent the 



