. .
His life was cheerful, constant servitude . . .
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, Nature was his book.
The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable
master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small
flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are
described, and the result left to the powers above:
Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
His tufted barley yellow with the sun.
While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to
do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows;
one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that
have been shot, for although--
Their danger well the wary plunderers know
And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
Will scatter death among them as they rise.
'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about
the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded
than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their
hands. It was for him to shift the dead from place to place,
to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings.
Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be
guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round
to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach
of hungry night-prowlers.
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