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forms above the homestead, in bold rivalry with the modest village fpire; when the peafant's flail had no tireless competitor in the iron threshing-machine,—they who reaped, and ploughed, and fowed, and mowed, were far merrier than in these days of model cottages, prize ploughmen, agricultural labourers, and aged paupers. "The harvest home" formed one of thofe occafions of rural festivity of which Clare, the farm-labourer's son, said:

O Rural Life! what charms thy meanness hide;
What sweet descriptions bards disdain to sing ;
What loves, what graces on thy plains abide :
Oh, could I soar me on the Muse's wing,
What rifled charms should my researches bring!
Pleased would I wander where those charms reside;
Of rural sports and beauties would I sing;
Those beauties, Wealth, which you in vain deride,
Beauties of richest bloom, superior to your pride.

Stevenson, the famous writer on English Agriculture, tells how, in the good old times, the harvest was wont to be celebrated :

"The furmenty pot welcomes home the harvest cart, and the garland of flowers crowns the captaine of the reapers. The pipe and the tabor are now fet bufily a-work, and the lad and the lafs will have no lead on their heels. O! 'tis the merrie time wherein honest neighbours make good cheer; and God is glorified in his bleffings on the earth."

Herrick gives us a lively scene of Harvest Home:

Come, sons of summer, by whose toile
We are the lords of wine and oile;
By whose tough labour and rough hands,

We rip up first, then reap our lands;
Crown'd with the eares of corn, now come,

And to the pipe sing harvest home.
Come forth, my Lord, and see the cart
Drest up with all the country art.
See here a mankin, there a sheet,
As spotless pure as it is sweet;
The horses, mares, and frisking fillies,
Clad all in linen, white as lilies;
The harvest swains and wenches bound
For joy to see the hock-cart crown'd.

When Tuffer wrote his "Five Hundred Points of Husbandry," he evidently confidered a good feast and merrie making at harvest homes as one most effential of his "points," for he tells us :

In harvest time, harvest folke,

servants and all,

Should make altogether,

good cheere in the hall:
And fill out the black bole,
of bleith to their song,
And let them be merry
all harvest time long.

Once ended thy harvest,
let none be beguilde,
Please such as did please thee,

man, woman, and child.
Thus doing, with alway

such help as they can, Thou winnest the praise

of the labouring man.

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"Tuffer Redivivus" adds:-" This, the poor labourer thinks, crowns all; a good fupper must be provided, and every one that did anything toward the Inning, must now have some reward, as ribbons, laces, rows of pins to boys and girls, if never so small, for their encouragement, and to be fure plumb-pudding. The men must now have fome better than beft drink, which with a little tobacco, and their screaming for their largeffes, their business will foon be done."

Some quaint people who love the "good old times," even now rejoice to hear the jovial fong of the harvest men :

We have ploughed, we have sowed,
We have reaped, we have mowed,
We have brought home every load,
Hip, hip, hip, Harvest Home!

But there are "potent, grave, and reverend fignors" now-a-days who seek to celebrate the harvest home by interefting lectures on "Common Things," and fage advice to

A merry and an artless throng, whose souls
Beam through untutored glances-

to patronize Savings' Banks, and fubfcribe to Burial Societies. Such lines as those of Tennyson, brother of the Poet Laureate, are more fuited to the merrie days of England, than to the present grim and iron age of Political Economy :

Come, let us mount the breezy down,

And hearken to the tumult blown

Up from the campaign and the town.

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