It would seem that the cat and I are almost the only able-bodied creatures, feathered, four-footed, or human, that are not out and about in the rain, and I alone because the indoor mood happens to possess me. If I shed that craze before the weeping weather is done, I may be squelching about with the rest all day long in the sodden lanes; or slithering joyfully over the green turf of the Downs miles away, barefoot and bareheaded, absent-mindedly whistling the first halves of innumerable tunes as I go. But of that in its season. The cat and I are of a mind now. The comforts of a dry coat appeal to each of us for the moment irresistibly; and we lean out over the window-sill no farther than will afford me a view of the village doings, and her an eye-feast on the martins chattering about the roof-eaves below. * * * * * I saw Farmer Coles go by in his gig to-day, and heard him call out to his bailiff on the footway, ‘If ’tis fine, George, i’ th’ marnin’, get all th’ tackle down to th’ Hoe-field, an’ make a start first thing.’ The word brought my heart into my mouth. The Hoe-field is the field where the first wild rose opened to the spell of the nightingale’s music; and it meant that haying-time had come round at last. To-morrow there might be a new sound in Windlecombe, the high ringing note of the mowing-machines; and I knew then there would be no hour of daylight free from it, until the last meadow lay shorn and desolate under the summer sun. In modern village life, the lot of the sentimentalist is no easy one, especially if he love his neighbour. Though he may secretly repine for the old days, when the grass came down to the rhythmic song of the scythe, and the corn to the tune of the sickle, he cannot blink the fact that, in farm life, prosperity and machinery go hand-in-hand together. The true, indeed the only, way for him now is to realise that not all the beauty of country things belongs to old times, and not all the hard, ugly utilitarianism of nowadays has come in with machinery. Honestly considered, there is no mechanical farm-implement of to-day essentially at variance with the spirit of beauty. A threshing-mill or a reaper-and-binder owes its form and parts to the same designer that made the sickle. The lines of a sailing-ship are unvaryingly lines of grace, because they are dictated by wind and water. And the unchanging needs of earth that made sickle, scythe, and ploughshare what they are, are as unchanging and imperious as ever.