To make hay properly we thought we needed two successive days of sun. When rain falls nearly every day haying comes to a standstill, for if the mown grass is left in the field it blackens and rots; if it is drawn to the barn, it turns musty in the mow. Usually the sun does its duty, but once in a while there comes a summer in Maine when there is so much wet weather that it is nearly impossible to harvest the hay crop. Such a summer was that of 1868. At the old farm our rule was to begin haying the day after the Fourth of July and to push the work as fast as possible, so as to get in most of the crop before dog-days. That summer I remember we had mowed four acres of grass on the morning of the fifth. But in the afternoon the sky clouded, the night turned wet, and the sun scarcely showed again for a week. A day and a half of clear weather followed; but showers came before the sodden swaths could be shaken up and the moisture dried out, and then dull or wet days followed for a week longer; that is, to the twenty-first of the month. Not a hundredweight of hay had we put into the barn, and the first hay we had mown had spoiled in the field. At such times the northeastern farmer must keep his patience--if he can. The old Squire had seen Maine weather for many years and had learned the uselessness of fretting. He looked depressed, but merely said that Halstead and I might as well begin going to the district school with the girls. In the summer we usually had to work on the farm during good weather, as boys of our age usually did in those days; but it was now too wet to hoe corn or to do other work in the field. We could do little except to wait for fair weather. Addison, who was older than I, did not go back to school and spent much of the time poring over a pile of old magazines up in the attic. Halstead and I had been going to school for four or five days when on coming home one afternoon we found a great stir of activity round the west barn. Timbers and boards had been fetched from an old shed on the "Aunt Hannah lot"--a family appurtenance of the home farm--and lay heaped on the ground. Two of the hired men were laying foundation stones along the side of the barn. Addison, who had just driven in with a load of long rafters from the old Squire's mill on Lurvey's Stream, called to us to help him unload them. "Why, what's going to be built?" we exclaimed. "Haymaker," he replied shortly. The answer did not enlighten us. "'Haymaker'?" repeated Halstead wonderingly.