In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his
poles and starts again brushing round.
Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village
beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in
their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit
Confess the presence of a pretty face.
She is very rustic herself in her appearance:--
Her hat awry, divested of her gown,
Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown:
Invidious barrier! why art thou so high,
When the slight covering of her neck slips by,
Then half revealing to the eager sight
Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?
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.
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