“Haud yer tongue, Tammie, and gang hame to yer books and yer schoolin. Troth, it will be twa days ere the craws dirty your kirk riggin!”
Wouf, wouf, wouf!—hee, hee, hee!—hoch, hoch, hoch!—there in they go, and in they are, their horny heads wedged over each other, and a trio of stout, well-made damsels, with petticoats tied up “à la breeches,” tugging away at their well-filled dugs.
“Troth, Jenny, that ewe will waur ye; ’od, I think ye hae gotten haud o’ the auld tup himsel. He’s as powerfu, let me tell ye, as auld Francie, wham ye kissed sae snug last nicht ayont the peat-mou.”
“Troth, at weel, Tam, ye’re a fearfu liar. They wad be fonder than I am o’ cock birds wha wad gie tippence for the stite o’ a howlet.”
“Howlet here, howlet there, Jenny, ye ken weel his auld brass will buy you a new pan.”
At this crisis the crack becomes general and inaudible from its universality, mixed as it is with the bleating of ewes, the barking of dogs, together with the singing of herd-laddies and of your humble servant.
Harvest is a blithe time! May all the charms of “Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on him” who shall first invent a reaping-machine! The best of all reaping-machines is “the human arm divine,” whether brawny or muscular, or soft and rounded. The old woman of sixty sits all year long at her domestic occupations—you would deem her incapable of any out-door exertions; but, at the sound of the harvest-horn, she renews her youth, and sallies forth into the harvest-field, with hook over shoulder, and a heart buoyant with the spirit of the season, to take her place and drive her rig with the youngest there. The half-grown boy and girl of fourteen are mingled up in duty and in frolic, in jest and jibe, and jeer and laugh, with the stoutest and the most matured. Mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and, above and beyond all, “lads and lasses, lovers gay!” mix and mingle in one united band, for honest labour and exquisite enjoyment; and when at last the joyous kirn is won—when the maiden of straw is borne aloft and in triumph, to adorn for twelve months the wall of the farmer’s ben—when the rich and cooling curds-and-cream have been ramhorn-spooned into as many mouths as there are persons in the “toun”—then comes the mighty and long-anticipated festival, the roasted ox, the stewed sheep, the big pot enriched with the cheering and elevating draught, the punch dealt about in ladles and in jugs, the inspiring fiddle, the maddening reel, and the Highland fling.
We cannot but remember such things were,
And were most dear to us!
Hay harvest, too, had its soft and delicate tints, resembling those of the grain harvest. As the upper rainbow curves and glows with fainter colouring around the interior and the brighter, so did the hay harvest of yore anticipate and prefigure, as it were, the other. The hay tedded to the sun; the barefooted lass, her locks floating in the breeze, her cheeks redolent of youth, and her eyes of joy, scattering or collecting, carting or ricking, the sweetly-scented meadow produce, under a June sun and a blue sky!