e of years to
seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined
charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality
during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties
of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending
drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of
nature's life.

As I write I am back in that marvellous time.--The cornfield, dark-green
and sweetly cool, is beginning to ripple in the wind with multitudinous
stir of shining, swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle
across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like
spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height,
and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the
clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings.

The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices. The bobolinks sail
and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their
exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The
king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the
top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the
prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move
like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop
momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty
amidst a roll of thunder.

The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the
luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the
toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in
sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing,
uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of
the sun and the season--and over all, and laving all, moves the slow
wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind
which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze.

At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of
our song, and that we were indeed "lords of the soil."

I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this
rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens
just that much heavier. I doubt if the women--any of them--got out into
the fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes.
Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, t