est position. Bright sunshine, with much air. Long drive in the evening. The chestnuts are in flower, and look beautifully. They are one of our richest trees when in blossom, and being common about the lake, are very ornamental to the country, at this season; they look as though they wore a double crown of sunshine about their flowery heads. The sumachs are also in bloom, their regular yellowish spikes showing from every thicket.
The hay-makers were busy on many farms after sunset this evening. There are fewer mowers in the hay-fields with us than in the Old World. Four men will often clear a field where, perhaps, a dozen men and women would be employed in France or England. This evening we passed a man with a horse-rake gathering his hay together by himself. As we went down the valley, he had just begun his task; when we returned, an hour and a half later, with the aid of this contrivance, he had nearly done his job.
One day, as we were driving along the bank of the lake, a year or two since, we saw, for the first time in this country, several young women at work in a hay-field; they looked quite picturesque with their colored sun-bonnets, and probably they did not find the work very hard, for they seemed to take it as a frolic.
We also chanced, on one occasion, to see a woman ploughing in this county, the only instance of the kind we have ever observed in our part of the world. Very possibly she may have been a foreigner, accustomed to hard work in the fields, in her own country. In Germany, we remember to have once seen a woman and a cow harnessed together, dragging the plough, while a man, probably the husband, was driving both. I have forgotten whether he had a whip or not. This is the only instance in
