When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for the scythe.  For in this, as in everything that a man can do—­of those things at least which are very old—­there is an exact moment when they are done best.  And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with delight.  But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in the making of hay.  Many think that hay is best made when the grass is thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has already heavily pulled the ground.  And there is another false reason for delay, which is wet weather.  For very few will understand (though it comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are over.  First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind; and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which always astonishes the world.  Now it is just before, or during, or at the very end of that rain—­but not later—­that grass should be cut for hay.  True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than the grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower and even to seed.  For what we get when we store our grass is not a harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before maturity:  as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our hay is best green.  So also Death should be represented with a scythe and Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes always too soon.  In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.  June was in full advance:  it was the beginning of that season when the night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it, never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.

Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the mowing.  The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window, all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the rivers of the Weald.  The birds and the thought of the mowing had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, just so, into the fields at morning.  In between that day and this were many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.