Toiling in the dust and heat; toiling without rest, wearily often, uncheered by songs. For the little choristers of the trees are themselves grave and sedate now, and busied with their nests, and with the care of rearing their family. There is little change, save a deepening of colour; the morning finds the earth still ceaselessly at work, and in the tender evenings and grey nights, the glimpsing lightnings and the intent stars disclose or behold the same scene: “Rapid, rosy-tinted lightnings, where the rocky clouds are riven, Like the lifting of a veil before the inner courts of heaven: Silver stars in azure evenings, slowly climbing up the steep”: What do these still discover? What but “Corn-fields ripening to the harvest, and the wide seas smooth with sleep.” Let Summer days then teach us, as, one after one, they greet us and depart, their wise, but unobtruded lesson. The Summer time being the time of grave steady work, and there being also such a time in our lives, a time of dust, and heat, and toil, when our spirits sometimes seem to flag, and the very sameness of labour brings over us a depression, and a lingering longing after the time of blossom, and of clear new verdure; there being this resemblance between us, let us examine the year’s work, if perhaps we may gather some hints for ours. _How_ does the year work? and how should _we_ work, when that first zest that made work easy has gone, and the time of rest is on the other side of our labour. The year works _thoroughly_, more implicitly obedient than man to this teaching of its Maker, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” God seems to have made, in all the wonderful animal and vegetable growth which surrounds us, some to honour, and some to dishonour. Even as with nations, there were the chosen people, and there were those left yet degraded--and as with individuals, there are those whose work is to evangelise a world, and there are those whose work is to follow the plough, or to order the household--so it is with plants, and flowers, and trees. And from this point of view we shall find that they have much to teach us in our work. How thoroughly it is all done, and with the might; the noble as well as the homely work! There are some plants busy maturing groundsel-seed and beech-mast, some maturing strawberries, and peaches, and pines. But each does _its utmost_, and the _work_ of the inferior degree is equal in quality with that of the higher. The shepherd’s-purse and the thistledown are as perfectly and exquisitely finished, as are the apricot and the grape.