f his work, but the opening
is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos in his apologetic
description of himself, as Giles, the farmer's boy.

Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes
Nor Science led me...
From meaner objects far my raptures flow...
Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew,
Delight from trifles, trifles ever new.
'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor,
Labour his portion...
His life was cheerful, constant servitude...
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, Nature was his book.

The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable master; the
animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small flock of fore-score
ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are described, and the result
left to the powers above:

Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
His tufted barley yellow with the sun.

While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to do
protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows; one of the
multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that have been shot, for
although--

Their danger well the wary plunderers know
And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
Will scatter death among them as they rise.

'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about the fields,
since in a little while they are no more regarded than the men of rags
and straw with sham rifles in their hands. It was for him to shift
the dead from place to place, to arrange them in dying attitudes with
outstretched wings. Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead
crows, to be guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge
round to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach of
hungry night-prowlers. Called up at daybreak each morning, he would take
his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks to "fields remote from
home" to redistribute his dead birds, then to fetch the cows, and here
we have an example of his close naturalist-like observation in his
account of the leading cow, the one who coming and going on all
occasions is allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by
many a broil," with just pride. A picture of the cool dairy and its
work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and luxury