ten minutes. Dark vapors cover the heavens, and sweep over the hill-tops, but the clouds open, gleams of sunshine come and go, and no rain falls. Long drive in the morning. The mowers are still at work here and there, for there is much hay cut in our neighborhood. The wheat harvest has also commenced, and the crop is pronounced a very good one.
There are certain fancies connected with the wheat-fields prevailing among our farmers, which they are very loth to give up. There is the old notion, for instance, that a single barberry-bush will blight acres of wheat, when growing near the grain, an opinion which is now, I believe, quite abandoned by persons of the best judgment. And yet you see frequent allusions to it, and occasionally some one brings up an instance which he sagely considers as unanswerable proof that the poor barberry is guilty of this crime. In this county we have no barberries; they are a naturalized shrub in America; at least, the variety now so common in many parts of the country came originally from the other hemisphere, and they have not yet reached us. There is another kind, a native, abundant in Virginia; whether this is also accused of blighting the wheat, I do not know.
The deceitful chess, or cheat, is another object of especial aversion to the farmers, and very justly. It is not only a troublesome weed among a valuable crop, but, looking so much like the grain, its deceptive appearance is an especial aggravation. Many of our country folk, moreover, maintain that this plant is nothing but a sort of wicked, degenerate wheat; they hold that a change comes over the grain by which it loses all its virtue, and takes another form, becoming, in short, the worthless chess; this opinion some of them maintain stoutly against all opponents, at the point of
