HAY-MAKING. 
171 
est position. Bright sunshine, with much air. Long drive in the 
evening. The chestnuts are in flower, and look beautifully. They 
are one of our richest trees when in blossom, and being common 
about the lake, are very ornamental to the countr3^ at this sea- 
son ; they look as though they wore a double crown of sunshine 
about their flowery heads. The sumachs are also in bloom, their 
regular yellowish spikes showing from every thicket. 
The hay-makers were busy on many farms after sunset this 
evening. There are fewer mowers in the hay-fields wfith us than 
in the Old World. Four men will often clear a field where, per- 
haps, a dozen men and w'omen would be employed in France or 
England. This evening w'e passed a man with a horse-rake 
gathering his hay together by himself. As Ave went down the 
valley, he had just begun his task ; when we returned, an hour 
and a half later, with the aid of this contrivance, he had nearly 
done his job. 
One day, as we w'ere driving along the bank of the lake, a year 
or two since, we saw, for the first time in this country, several 
young women at work in a hay-field ; they looked quite pictur- 
esque with their colored sun-bonnets, and probably they did not 
find the work very hard, for they seemed to take it as a frolic. 
We also chanced, on one occasion, to see a woman ploughing 
in this county, the only instance of the kind we have ever ob- 
served in our part of the world. Very possibly she may have 
been a foreigner, accustomed to hard work in the fields, in her 
own country. In Germany, we remember to have once seen a 
woman and a cow harnessed together, dragging the plough, while 
a man, probably the husband, was driving both. I haA^e forgot- 
ten whether he had a whip or not. This is the only instance in 
