CHAPTER XIX
DOG DAYS, GRAIN HARVEST, AND A TRULY LUCRETIAN TEMPEST
After haying came grain harvest. There were three acres of wheat, four of oats, an acre of barley, an acre of buckwheat and an acre and three-fourths of rye to get in. The rye, however, had been harvested during the last week of haying. It ripened early, for it was the Old Squire's custom to sow his rye very early in the spring. The first work which we did on the land, after the snow melted, was to plough and harrow for rye. With the rye we always sowed clover and herdsgrass seed for a hay crop the following year. This we termed "seeding down;" and the Old Squire liked rye the best of all grain crops for this purpose. "Grass seed 'catches' better with rye than oats, or barley, or even wheat," he was accustomed to say.
When we harvested the grain, he would be seen peering into the stubble with an observant eye, and would then be heard to say, "A pretty good 'catch' this year," or, "It hasn't 'caught' worth a cent."
It was not on more than half the years that we secured a fair wheat crop. Maine is not a State wholly favorable for wheat; yet the Old Squire persisted in sowing it, year by year, although Addison often demonstrated to him that oats were more profitable and could be exchanged for flour. "But a farmer ought to raise his bread-stuff," the old gentleman would rejoin stoutly. "How do we know, too, that some calamity may not cut off the Western wheat crop; then where should we be?"
It is a pity, perhaps, that Eastern farmers do not generally display the same independent spirit.
But the Old Squire himself finally gave up wheat raising. Gram and the girls found fault with our Maine grown wheat flour, because the bread from it was not very white and did not "rise" well. The neighbors had Western flour and their bread was white and light, while ours was darker colored and sometimes heavy, in spite of their best efforts.
No farmer can hold out long against such indoor repinings, but the Old Squire never came to look with favor on Western flour; he admitted that it made whiter bread, but he always declared that it was not as wholesome! The fact was that it seemed to him to be an unfarmerlike proceeding, to buy his flour. For the same reason he would never buy Western corn for his cattle.