Much farmhouse work has a trace of pleasure. Such is going a-greening in mornings of the still season before grasshoppers chirp or moths flutter or bats whir or dewdrops patter—mornings when people look up and repeat the distich,
Mackerel sky! mackerel sky!
It won't be long wet, and it won't be long dry.
While the girl gathers skokeweed, milkweed, dock and dandelion from the fields, deerweed from the corners of the fence that runs around the woods, cowslip from the fragrant swamp, and adder's tongue and crinkle-root from the black forest earth, to make a dish loved by women and hated by men, she sees the airy attacks of crows upon a hawk, and his escape from them by sailing up, up, in circles delightful to contemplate for their height and immensity to altitudes his enemies cannot attain. At times she is near enough to a hawk to catch one glance from his bright, observant, defiant eye—a different glance from that of the caged bird. At times she finds an owl dreaming on the edge of a wood, and gazes long into its strange, deep, contemplative, satisfying eyes, and recollects the boys say an owl knows whether a hunter's gun is loaded or not. She sees the crows make an attack on the owl too, rushing upon it with a wild "ha! ha!" of multitudinous laughter and clattering of wings that are met with still indifference, for the owl knows that not one dares venture within reach of its iron claw and bending beak. And, ah, too rarely, she beholds an eagle on the dry branch of a tall pine. He, like the owl, encounters with nonchalance the insolent hate of the crows, who caw, flap their wings about his head and perch around him in myriads. When he rises, as he waves his broad and long wings in the leisurely movements that plunge him so swiftly through the blazing sky, the eagle will grasp a crow in his talons and drop it dead on the plain, where the girl picks it up, a mass of crushed feathers.
To go blackberrying is a fête. It falls on a day when the morning meadows, veiled in cobwebs strung with drops of dew, assert that though
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow.
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.
They go in straw hats and sun-bonnets, with tinkling milkpails and buckets in their wagon, and driving the sleek bay brood mare as carefully as if she were crammed with nitro-glycerine and would blow up at a touch. They travel merrily along a road that is nothing but "the bare possibility of going somewhere;" they pass through a pair of bars; they follow a lonely farm-track; they stop in a stump-lot, where they leave the mare in a doze, and, crossing the light baked earth of the clearing still covered with puff-balls and the dry stalks and kexes of forest plants, they dive into the berry-patch, a steep gulf of briers terraced by former berry-seekers. As they pick their way downward in the hot sunshine, the pealing sound of waters comes up to meet them through dense woods beneath their feet, for a broad, dark, perfumed stream, margined with pebbles and yeasty and barmy with foam, rushes through the bottom of the ravine. Refreshing is its odor when the berry-pickers reach it: they quaff its moist breath as one would drink some melanagogue, some old medicine able to cure sorrow or fear. The sight of its heavy verdure and of its gurges heaped high with froth lifts them like immortal thoughts. Half an hour of skipping stones on the water, a lunch on a rock, a drive homeward with their wagonload of fruit, and the day's work is done.
There is a ball in summer for the hired girl's delectation. You should stand in the village street and look up at the lighted tavern ball-room, and listen to the thundering floor. You would see the heads of the village tailor, harness-maker and photographer bobbing up and down; the hired man's head, with its heavy forelock whipping his forehead; the white brow and swarthy cheeks of the farm-boy leaping above the rest; and the hired girl's rosy face shaken up with scores of other young girls' faces, wagging, whirling, swaying, in delirious arcs and parabolas, and all wearing a perturbed and anxious expression, as if they were hard put to it to keep track of the fiddler's "Swing pardners once and a half; all sashay; allemand left," and so on. The hired girl dances "every heat," and at half-past three rides home through a landscape like a line from Milton, giving a vast idea of night and darkness and the stillness brooding over a woody, pastoral country. As she lifts the kitchen latch she sees a line of citron-green light behind the eastern hills, and
The curled moon
Is like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf.
Later comes the hired man on foot, having run the risk of being "chawed up" by farmhouse dogs for a mile and a half. The two seek their beds through Saharas of darkness in woodhouse, kitchen, back entry and back stairs, and at five are both up milking and milk-skimming.
Going to funerals is a heart's delight for the hired girl. She relishes the ride in fine weather, the good funeral sermon, the sight of other people's best clothes and furniture, the touch of tragedy we all like in life, the cheerful reaction after the solemnity, and the staving good supper she cooks when they come home.