Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/37

Rh This morning (it is July 10) the vesper sparrow is singing here also, with the song sparrow and the chipper. And while I am listening to them—but mainly to the vesper—the sickle stroke (as I believe Mr. Burroughs calls it) of a meadow lark cuts the air. It is a good concert, vesper sparrow and lark going most harmoniously together; and to make it better still, a bobolink pours out one copious strain. Him I am especially glad to hear. After the grass is cut one feels as if bobolink days were over.

However, the grass is not all cut yet. I hear the rattle of a distant mowing-machine as I walk, and by and by come in sight of a man swinging a scythe. That is the poetry of farming—from the spectator's point of view; and I think from the mower's also, when he is cutting his own grass and is his own master. I like to watch him, at all events. Every motion he makes is as familiar to me as the swaying of branches in the wind. How long will it be, I wonder, before young people will be asking their seniors what a scythe was like,