meadow land, alternating with plowed fields and patches of waving
grain. Few of their features are picturesque; they are bare, broad,
and simple. The farmhouse gets itself a coat of white paint, and
green blinds to the windows, and the barn and wagon-house a coat of
red paint with white trimmings, as soon as possible. A penstock
flows by the doorway, rows of tin pans sun themselves in the yard,
and the great wheel of the churning-machine flanks the milk-house,
or rattles behind it. The winters are severe, the snow deep. The
principal fuel is still wood,--beech, birch, and maple. It is hauled
off the mountain in great logs when the first November or December
snows come, and cut up and piled in the wood-houses and under a
shed. Here the axe still rules the winter, and it may be heard all
day and every day upon the wood-pile, or echoing through the
frost-bound wood, the coat of the chopper hanging to a limb, and his
white chips strewing the snow.

Many cattle need much hay; hence in dairy sections haying is the
period of "storm and stress" in the farmer's year. To get the hay
in, in good condition, and before the grass gets too ripe, is a
great matter. All the energies and resources of the farm are bent to
this purpose. It is a thirty or forty days' war, in which the farmer
and his "hands" are pitted against the heat and the rain and the
legions of timothy and clover. Everything about it has the urge, the
hurry, the excitement of a battle. Outside help is procured; men
flock in from adjoining counties, where the ruling industry is
something else and is less imperative; coopers, blacksmiths, and
laborers of various kinds drop their tools, and take down their
scythes and go in quest of a job in haying. Every man is expected to
pitch his endeavors in a little higher key than at any other kind of
work. The wages are extra, and the work must correspond. The men are