five years old. Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no
more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans. You may
meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of
times in the morning. Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense
of what is due to that labourer. When the plums are gathered, for
instance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tarts
across which her arm can hardly reach. No plum tarts elsewhere are
anything but dull in comparison with these. There is, besides, the first
loaf from the new flour, brown from the maize and white from the wheat.
Nor can a day of potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a
little fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the
wood ashes. Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even
when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a
child's tooth.

Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a
real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing
but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of
the hedges. They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation,
but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale are the joys of nutting
beside those of haymaking, but at least they are something.

Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories
for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking
flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating
into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children,
who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they
breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of
place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be
recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of