And what is this? It looks like a haying-bee. Eight horses and two yokes of oxen, with several empty “hay-riggings” and as many buggies, stand in confused order beside the road, and over the wall men are mowing, spreading, and turning. It is some widow’s grass field, I imagine, and her loyal neighbors have assembled to harvest the crop. Human nature is not so bad, after all. So I am saying, with the inexpensive charity natural to a sentimental traveler, when I find myself near a group of younger men who are bantering one of their number (I am behind a bushy screen), mixing their talk plentifully with oaths; such a vulgar, stupid, witless repetition of sacred names--without one saving touch of originality or picturesqueness--as our honest, thoroughbred, rustic New Englander may challenge the world to equal. These can be no workers for charity, I conclude; and when I inquire of a man who overtakes me on the road (with an invitation to ride), he says: “Oh, no, that is Mr. Blank’s farm, and those are all his hired men. He is about the richest man in Bethlehem.” So my pretty idyl vanishes in smoke; the smoke, I am tempted to say, of burning brimstone. I have one consolation, such as it is: the men are Bethlehemites, not Franconians, though I am not so certain that a swearing match between the two towns would prove altogether one-sided. It is nothing new, of course, that beautiful scenery does not always refine those who live near it. It works to that end, within its measure, I am bound to believe, for those who see it; but “there’s the rub.” Whether men see it or not, the landscape takes no heed. There it stretches as I turn to look, spaces of level green valley, with mountains and hills round about--mountains and valleys each made perfect by the other. I sit down once more in a favorable spot, where every line of the picture falls true, and drink my fill of its loveliness, while a hermit thrush out of the hill woods yonder blesses my ears with music. I have Emerson’s wish--“health and a day.”