Ah! now I am seated as I love to be, the June blue over me, and the sweet, warm, new-made hay underneath. On the shadow side of a great haycock, here have I selected my seat, plunging down and feeling the soft cushion give, until it has attained consistency enough to resist me. I have been busy, very busy, all this week, and the week before that, and indeed several weeks back. And I have earned, and mean to indulge in, a quiet long afternoon, and perhaps evening, in the hay-field. I have a book with me, but I do not pledge myself to read much. I have not come out here to read; not to do much, indeed, but just to sit and muse, nay, chiefly to enjoy the feeling of being able to rest. To feel that there is, or shall be, so far as I can choose, no call for the remainder of this day upon anxious heart and weary brain; no parish troubles; no sick, whose silent cry in the distance forbids the pastor to sit still; no sermon, no article, to think out or to write; no letters to pour into that insatiable post-office,--the true sieve of the Danaids; not even any gardening to do or to superintend; no, nothing necessary but to sit on the side of a haycock “in the leafy month of June.” We may go on and on in the round of every day’s business, on and on, unpausing, till we drop: the mere energy of spinning may keep us up, though perhaps on a weak and tottering peg; and work begets work; and busy day will chase busy day like the sails of a windmill; and we hardly dare stop, because we foreknow how we shall then have a long bill to pay, all the arrears of those fatigues and that weariness that we bade stand aside as we laboured on; and we know that if we once stop to give them a hearing, it will be hard work to set the heavy machinery going again. For myself, I often feel that to go on working, is to be able to work; to pause is to collapse, and to feel incapable. Still, in fact, we make life go farther by careful trading, than by spending all our capital at once. And both for purposes of devotional retirement and of necessary recreation, it is well sometimes just “to sport our oak” (to speak in Oxford phrase) upon the noisy and importunate throng of things clamorous to be done, and yet which, if discharged, would but give place to as many more. I could dizzy my brain with thoughts of business that I might do, and want to do. But for some weeks I have worked on and worked on, hoping to satisfy all claims; waiting for a pause, which never would come; and now I will no longer wait for it, but make it. Away! crowding calls, for this afternoon, for all the rest of this day. The wrestling, restless, toiling, moiling, weary world is quite shut out from me behind this mighty chain of haycocks. I hear the sharpening of scythes, and their long sweep in the bending swathes; once or twice in the afternoon a cuckoo sails with broad wing over me, and voice which stammers now near the end of his monotonous but prized oration; there