The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land; not so the barbarous practice of docking horses’ tails, against which he protests in this place when describing the summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of their only defence against such an enemy.  At his own little farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old broken-winged gander, “the pest and tryant of the yard,” whose unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by the fetlocks.  The swine alone did not resent the attacks but welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their pigs’ eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

“Autumn” opens bravely: 

   Again the year’s decline, ’midst storms and floods,
   The thund’ring chase, the yellow fading woods
   Invite my song.

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a delightful picture which must be given in full:—­

   No more the fields with scattered grain supply
   The restless tenants of the sty;
   From oak to oak they run with eager haste,
   And wrangling share the first delicious taste
   Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found
   Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground. 
   It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave: 
   Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave;
   The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young,
   Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among,
   Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round,
   Where last year’s mould’ring leaves bestrew the ground,
   And o’er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls,
   Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls;
   Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool
   The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool,
   The wild duck’s lonely haunt, whose jealous eye
   Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly,
   On the calm bosom of her little lake,
   Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake;
   And as the bold intruders press around,
   At once she starts and rises with a bound;
   With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear,
   And ludicrously wild and winged with fear,
   The herd decamp with more than swinish speed,
   And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed;
   Through tangled thickets headlong on they go,
   Then stop and listen for their fancied foe;
   The hindmost still the growing panic spreads,
   Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds,
   Till Folly’s wages, wounds and thorns, they reap;
   Yet glorying in their fortunate