tossing the green swaths wide to the sun. It is one of Nature's
festivities, endeared by a thousand pleasant memories and habits of the
olden days, and not a soul can resist it.

There is a sound of tinkling teams and of wagons rolling along lanes and
fields the whole country over, aye, even at midnight, till at length the
fragrant ricks rise in the farmyard, and the pale smooth-shaven fields
are left in solitary beauty.

They who know little about it may deem the strong _penchant_ of our
poets, and of ourselves, for rural pleasures, mere romance and poetic
illusion; but if poetic beauty alone were concerned, we must still
admire _harvest-time_ in the country. The whole land is then an Arcadia,
full of simple, healthful, and rejoicing spirits. Overgrown towns and
manufactories may have changed for the worse, the spirit and feelings of
our population; in them, "evil communications may have corrupted good
manners;" but in the country at large, there never was a more
simple-minded, healthful-hearted, and happy race of people than our
present British peasantry. They have cast off, it is true, many of their
ancestors' games and merrymakings, but they have in no degree lost their
soul of mirth and happiness. This is never more conspicuous than in
_harvest-time_.

With the exception of a casual song of the lark in a fresh morning, of
the blackbird and thrush at sunset, or the monotonous wail of the
yellow-hammer, the silence of birds is now complete; even the lesser
reed-sparrow, which may very properly be called the _English mock-bird_,
and which kept up a perpetual clatter with the notes of the sparrow, the
swallow, the white-throat, &c. in every hedge-bottom, day and night,
has ceased.