you breathe and move with an effort. The air
is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles
seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of
pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses
us.

The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the
idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of haemoglobin in his blood. The
Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the
pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
with compressed air.

Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the
harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the high
blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white
in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the
clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still
vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it
will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and
harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and
matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures
will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it
stands waiting for them in the meadows.

What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various,
a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that
makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that
furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the
grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley,
rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses.

Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It
gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that
we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a
tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw
no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial,
mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity,
are the prevailing notes.

From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of
stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze,