in haying who do not do another stroke on the farm the whole year.  It is a gymnasium in the meadows and under the summer sky.  How full of pictures, too!—­the smooth slopes dotted with cocks with lengthening shadows; the great, broad-backed, soft-cheeked loads, moving along the lanes and brushing under the trees; the unfinished stacks with forkfuls of hay being handed up its sides to the builder, and when finished the shape of a great pear, with a pole in the top for the stem.  Maybe in the fall and winter the calves and yearlings will hover around it and gnaw its base until it overhangs them and shelters them from the storm.  Or the farmer will “fodder” his cows there,—­one of the most picturesque scenes to be witnessed on the farm,—­twenty or thirty or forty milchers filing along toward the stack in the field, or clustered about it, waiting the promised bite.  In great, green flakes the hay is rolled off, and distributed about in small heaps upon the unspotted snow.  After the cattle have eaten, the birds—­snow buntings and red-polls—­come and pick up the crumbs, the seeds of the grasses and weeds.  At night the fox and the owl come for mice.

What a beautiful path the cows make through the snow to the stack or to the spring under the hill!—­always more or less wayward, but broad and firm, and carved and indented by a multitude of rounded hoofs.

In fact, the cow is the true pathfinder and path-maker.  She has the leisurely, deliberate movement that insures an easy and a safe way.  Follow her trail through the woods, and you have the best, if not the shortest, course.  How she beats down the brush and briers and wears away even the roots of the trees!  A herd of cows left to themselves fall naturally into single file, and a hundred or more hoofs are not long in smoothing and compacting almost any surface.

Indeed, all the ways and doings of cattle are pleasant to look upon, whether grazing in the pasture or browsing in the woods, or ruminating under the trees, or feeding in the stall, or reposing upon the knolls.  There is virtue in the cow; she is full of goodness; a wholesome odor exhales from her; the whole landscape looks out of her soft eyes; the quality and the aroma of miles of meadow and pasture lands are in her presence and products.  I had rather have the care of cattle than be the keeper of the great seal of the nation.  Where the cow is, there is Arcadia; so far as her influence prevails, there is contentment, humility, and sweet, homely life.

Blessed is he whose youth was passed upon the farm, and if it was a dairy farm, his memories will be all the more fragrant.  The driving of the cows to and from the pasture, every day and every season for years,—­how much of summer and of nature he got into him on these journeys!  What rambles and excursions did this errand furnish the excuse for!  The birds and birds’-nests, the berries, the squirrels, the woodchucks, the beech woods with their treasures into which the cows loved so to wander