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; 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 rip up first, then reap our lands; And to the pipe sing harvest home. 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: Once ended thy harvest, man, woman, and child. such help as they can, Thou winnest the praise of the labouring man. "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, 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 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. E |