"When I cannot raise fodder enough for my stock, I'll quit farming," he would exclaim, when his neighbors told him of the corn they were buying. As a matter of fact, the old gentleman lived to see a good many of his neighbors' farms under mortgage, and held a number of these papers himself. It was not a wholly propitious day for New England farmers when they began buying Western corn, on the theory that they could buy it cheaper than they could raise it themselves. The net result has been that their profits have often gone West, or into the pockets of the railway companies which draw the corn to them.
Another drawback to wheat raising in Maine is the uncertain weather at harvest time. Despite our shrewdest inspection of the weather signs, the wheat as well as the other grain would often get wet in the field, and sometimes it would lie wet so long as to sprout. Sprouted wheat flour makes a kind of bread which drives the housewife to despair.
"Oh, this dog-days weather!" the Old Squire would exclaim, as the grain lay wet in the field, day after day, or when an August shower came rumbling over the mountains just as we were raking it up into windrows and tumbles.
I had never heard of "dog days" before and was curious to know what sort of days they were. "They set in," the Old Squire informed me, "on the twenty-fifth of July and last till the fifth of September. Then is when the Dog-star rages, and it is apt to be 'catching' weather. Dogs are more liable to run mad at this time of year, and snakes are most venomous then." Such is the olden lore, and I gained an impression that those forty-two days were after a manner unhealthy for man and beast.
Near the middle of August that summer there came the most terrific thunder shower which I had ever witnessed. Halse, Addison and Asa Doane had mowed the acre of barley that morning, and after dinner we three boys went out into the field to turn the swaths, for the sun had been very hot all day. It was while thus employed that we saw the shower rising over the mountains to the westward and soon heard the thunder. It rose rapidly, and the clouds took on, as they rolled upward, a peculiar black, greenish tint.
It was such a tempest as Lucretius describes when he says,—
"So dire and terrible is the aspect of Heaven, that one might think all the Darkness had left Acheron, to be poured out across the sky, as the drear gloom of the storm collects and the Tempest, forging loud thunderbolts, bends down its black face of terror over the affrighted earth."
Gramp called us in, to carry a few cocks of late-made hay into the barn from the orchard, and then bade us shut all the barn doors and make things snug. "For there's a tremendous shower coming, boys," he said. "There's hail in those clouds."
We ran to do as he advised, and had no more than taken these precautions when the shower struck. Such awful thunder and such bright, vengeful lightning had, the people of the vicinity declared, never been observed in that town, previously. A bolt came down one of the large Balm o' Gilead trees near the house, and the thunder peal was absolutely deafening. Wealthy hid herself in the parlor clothes-closet, and Gram sat with her hands folded in the middle of the sitting-room. Just before the clouds burst, it was so dark in the house that we could scarcely see each others' faces. A moment later the lightning struck a large butternut tree near the calf-pasture wall, across the south field, shivering it so completely that nearly all the top fell; the trunk, too, was split open from the heart.
In fact, the terrific flashes and peals indicated that the lightning was descending to the earth all about us. Two barns were struck and burned in the school district adjoining ours. Rain then fell in sheets, and also hail, which cut the garden vegetables to strings and broke a number of windows. This tempest lasted for nearly an hour, and prostrated the corn and standing grain very badly. An apple tree was also up-rooted, for there was violent wind as well as lightning and thunder.