It Belongs To
The Lord Of The Manor, And Must Have Twenty Or Thirty Acres In It.
They've Been Three
Or four days cutting the grass on it with a machine,
and now there's been nearly two days with hardly
Any rain, only now and
then some drizzling, and a good, strong wind, which they think here is
better for the hay-making than sunshine, though they don't object to a
little sun. All the people in the village who had legs good enough to
carry them to that field went to help make hay. It was a regular
holiday, and as hay is clean, nearly everybody was dressed in good
clothes. Early in the morning some twenty regular farm laborers began
raking the hay at one end of the field, stretching themselves nearly
the whole way across it, and as the day went on more and more people
came, men and women, high and low. All the young women and some of the
older ones had rakes, and the way they worked them was amazing to see,
but they turned over the hay enough to dry it. As to schoolgirls and
boys, there was no end of them in the afternoon, for school let out
early. Some of them worked, but most of them played and cut up
monkey-shines on the hay. Even the little babies was brought on the
field, and nice, soft beds made for them under the trees at one side.
When Jone saw the real farm-work going on, with a chance for everybody
to turn in to help, his farmer blood boiled within him, as if he was a
war-horse and sniffed the smoke of battle, and he got himself a rake
and went to work like a good-fellow.
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