[from] Adam Bede

by George Eliot

[With her characteristic fondness for human nature, Eliot describes the haymaking scene in the English countryside of 1799.]

… All hands were to be out in the meadows this morning as soon as the dew had risen; the wives and daughters did double work in every farmhouse, that the maids might give their help in tossing the hay; and when Adam was marching along the lanes, with his basket of tools over his shoulder, he caught the sound of jocose talk and ringing laughter from behind the hedges. The jocose talk of hay-makers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cows’ necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature. Men’s muscles move better when their souls are making merry music, though their merriment is of a poor blundering sort, not at all like the merriment of birds…

Published in 1859, Adam Bede is now in the public domain.