e shaken up and the moisture dried out,
and then dull or wet days followed for a week longer; that is, to the
twenty-first of the month. Not a hundredweight of hay had we put into
the barn, and the first hay we had mown had spoiled in the field.

At such times the northeastern farmer must keep his patience--if he can.
The old Squire had seen Maine weather for many years and had learned the
uselessness of fretting. He looked depressed, but merely said that
Halstead and I might as well begin going to the district school with the
girls.

In the summer we usually had to work on the farm during good weather, as
boys of our age usually did in those days; but it was now too wet to hoe
corn or to do other work in the field. We could do little except to wait
for fair weather. Addison, who was older than I, did not go back to
school and spent much of the time poring over a pile of old magazines up
in the attic.

Halstead and I had been going to school for four or five days when on
coming home one afternoon we found a great stir of activity round the
west barn. Timbers and boards had been fetched from an old shed on the
"Aunt Hannah lot"--a family appurtenance of the home farm--and lay
heaped on the ground. Two of the hired men were laying foundation stones
along the side of the barn. Addison, who had just driven in with a load
of long rafters from the old Squire's mill on Lurvey's Stream, called to
us to help him unload them.

"Why, what's going to be built?" we exclaimed.

"Haymaker," he replied shortly.

The answer did not enlighten us.

"'Haymaker'?" repeated Halstead wonderingly.

"Yes, haymaker," said Addison. "So bear a hand here. We've got to hurry,
too, if we are to make any hay this year." He then told us that the old
Squire had driven to the village six miles away, to get a load of
hothouse glass. While we stood pondering that bit of puzzling
information, a third hired man drove into the yard on a heavy wagon
drawn by a span of work horses. On the wagon was the old fire box and
the boiler of a stationary steam engine that we had had for some time in
the shook shop a mile down the road.

We learned at supper that Addison and the old Squire, having little to
do that day except watch the weather, had put their heads together and
hatched a plan to make hay from freshly mown grass without the aid of
the sun. I have always understood that the plan originated in something
that Addison had read, or in some picture th