HARVEST. 



279 



in the case of barley, oats, flax, and rye as with wheat, 

 only the riddles, or screens, are changed in the thresher. 

 Sometimes, if the harvest is small, the threshing is de- 

 layed until perhaps in October, when the machine can 

 best attend to these lesser jobs; or it is put off still 

 further till winter, and then the grain is tramped out 

 of the heads by horses, or beaten out by a flail (we can 

 hear the dubbing of the swipple as it hits the barn 

 floor), and the straw is raked off, and the wheat is win- 

 nowed and cleaned from the chaff and dust in one of 

 the old-time hand-turned fanning mills. 



It is all of it interesting work to one who loves the 

 country; and, as I have said of haying, a good swim 

 in a pond or a brook in the evenings, under the lustrous 

 harvest moon, after the work is over, to wash off the 

 perspiration and the pieces of chaff and straw, is equally 

 pleasurable. But, while enjoyable work, scythes and 

 cradles and sickles and knives must all be sharpened, 

 and many a boy has got his start in life turning the 

 grindstone for his father. The boy will have to be 

 careful in handling the sheaves, or he may find himself 

 scratched by a briar which has been bound up with the 

 wheat; and he must be careful not to get a beard of 

 barley down his throat, and not to run too swiftly bare- 

 foot in the stubble. Not many children that have ever 

 been on a farm in threshing-time have gone through it 

 without chewing a handful of the grains of wheat into 

 "wax," which, with gum from the cherry, spruce, and 

 sweet gum trees, is the country's substitute for the 

 manufactured "chewing gum" of the city; and few also 

 but have made oat whistles from a straw, or cornstalk 

 fiddles from a cane of maize. 



