ignominy to be mowed out of your swath. Hay-gathering is
clean, manly work all through. Young fellows work in haying who do
not do another stroke on the farm the whole year. It is a gymnasium
in the meadows and under the summer sky. How full of pictures,
too!--the smooth slopes dotted with cocks with lengthening shadows;
the great, broad-backed, soft-cheeked loads, moving along the lanes
and brushing under the trees; the unfinished stacks with forkfuls of
hay being handed up its sides to the builder, and when finished the
shape of a great pear, with a pole in the top for the stem. Maybe in
the fall and winter the calves and yearlings will hover around it
and gnaw its base until it overhangs them and shelters them from
the storm. Or the farmer will "fodder" his cows there,--one of the
most picturesque scenes to be witnessed on the farm,--twenty or
thirty or forty milchers filing along toward the stack in the field,
or clustered about it, waiting the promised bite. In great, green
flakes the hay is rolled off, and distributed about in small heaps
upon the unspotted snow. After the cattle have eaten, the
birds--snow buntings and red-polls--come and pick up the crumbs, the
seeds of the grasses and weeds. At night the fox and the owl come
for mice.

What a beautiful path the cows make through the snow to the stack or
to the spring under the hill!--always more or less wayward, but
broad and firm, and carved and indented by a multitude of rounded
hoofs.

In fact, the cow is the true pathfinder and path-maker. She has the
leisurely, deliberate movement that insures an easy and a safe way.
Follow her trail through the woods, and you have the best, if not
the shortest, course. How she beats down the brush and briers and
wears away even the roots of the trees! A herd of cows left to
themselves fall naturally into single file, and a hundred or more
hoofs are not long in smoothing and compacting almost any surface.

Indeed, all the ways and doings of cattle are pleasant to look upon,
whether grazing in the pasture or browsing in the woods, or
ruminating under the trees, or feeding in the stall, or reposing
upon the knolls. There is virtue in the cow; she is full of
goodness; a wholesome odor exhales from her; the whole landscape
looks out of her soft eyes; the quality and the aroma of miles of
meadow and pasture lands are in her presence and products. I had
rather have the care of cattle than be the keeper of the great seal
of