It looked like preconcerted action on the
part of tide, tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the
elements all pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped
like threads. Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or lost,
immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to trees; but
no use: trees were upturned, the cables stretched till they grew
small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back against the
desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of her old
grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft, floats were
overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers were snapped
like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the air, the steamer
plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of water.

VIII

I am glad to observe that all the poetry of the midsummer harvesting has
not gone out with the scythe and the whetstone. The line of mowers was a
pretty sight, if one did not sympathize too deeply with the human backs
turned up there to the sun, and the sound of the whetstone, coming up
from the meadows in the dewy morning, was pleasant music. But I find the
sound of the mowing-machine and the patent reaper is even more in tune
with the voices of Nature at this season. The characteristic sounds of
midsummer are the sharp, whirring crescendo of the cicada or harvest
fly, and the rasping, stridulous notes of the nocturnal insects. The
mowing-machine repeats and imitates these sounds. 'T is like the hum of
a locust or the shuffling of a mighty grasshopper. More than that, the
grass and the grain at this season have become hard. The timothy stalk
is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers
snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased;
the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless;
and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of the mower and the
hay-tedder.

IX

'T is an evidence of how directly we are related to Nature, that we more
or less sympathize with the weather, and take on the color of the day.
Goethe said he worked easiest on a high barometer. One is like a chimney
that draws well some days and won't draw at all on others, and the
secret is mainly in the condition of the atmosphere. Anything positive
and decided with the weather is a good omen. A pouring rain may be more
auspicious than a sleeping sunshine. When the stove draws well, the fogs
an