the Old Squire's to begin "haying" on Monday after
the Fourth of July. What hot and sweaty memories are linked with that
word, _haying!_

But haying in and of itself is a clean and pleasant kind of farm work,
if only the farmers would not rush it so relentlessly. As soon as haying
begins, a demon of haste to finish in a given number of days seems, or
once seemed, to take possession of the American farmer. Thunder showers
goad him on; the fact that he has to pay two or even three dollars per
day for his hired help stimulates him to even greater exertions; and the
net result is, that haying time every year is a fiery ordeal from which
the husbandman and his boys emerge sunburnt, brown as bacon scraps and
lean as the camels of Sahara, often with blood perniciously altered from
excessive perspiration and too copious water drinking. An erroneous idea
has prevailed that "sweating" is good for a man. Sometimes it is good,
in case of colds or fevers. While unduly exerting himself beneath a
scorching sun, the farmer would no doubt perish if he did not perspire.
None the less, such copious sudation is an evil that wastefully saps
vitality. Few farmers go through twenty haying seasons without
practically breaking down.

The hired man, too, has come to know that haying is the hardest work of
the year and demands nearly double the wages that he expected to receive
for hoeing potatoes--far more disagreeable work--the week before.

As a result of many inquiries, I learn that farmers' boys dread haying
most of all farm work, chiefly on account of the long hours, the hurry
beneath the fervid July sun, and the heat of the close lofts and mows
where they have to stow away the hay. How many a lad, half-suffocated by
hay in these same hot mows and lofts, has made the resolve then and
there never to be a farmer--and kept it!

Is it not a serious mistake to harvest the hay crop on the
hurry-and-rush principle? Why not take a little more time for it? It is
better to let a load of hay get wet than drive one's self and one's
helpers to the brink of sunstroke. It is better to begin a week earlier
than try to do two weeks' work in one. A day's work in haying should and
can be so planned as to give two hours' nooning in the hottest part of
the day.

Gramp was an old-fashioned farmer, but he had seen the folly of undue
haste exemplified too many times not to have changed his earlier methods
of work considerably; so much so, that he now enjoyed