Perfect weather for an outdoor
July merry-making, yet surely not the best time of year to be born in.
Nature seems to make a hot pause just then: all the loveliest flowers
are gone; the sweet time of early growth and vague hopes is past; and
yet the time of harvest and ingathering is not come, and we tremble at
the possible storms that may ruin the precious fruit in the moment
of its ripeness. The woods are all one dark monotonous green; the
waggon-loads of hay no longer creep along the lanes, scattering their
sweet-smelling fragments on the blackberry branches; the pastures are
often a little tanned, yet the corn has not got its last splendour
of red and gold; the lambs and calves have lost all traces of their
innocent frisky prettiness, and have become stupid young sheep and cows.
But it is a time of leisure on the farm--that pause between hay-and
corn-harvest, and so the farmers and labourers in Hayslope and Broxton
thought the captain did well to come of age just then, when they could
give their undivided minds to the flavour of the great cask of ale which
had been brewed the autumn after "the heir" was born, and was to be
tapped on his twenty-first birthday. The air had been merry with the
ringing of church-bells very early this morning, and every one had made
haste to get through the needful work before twelve, when it would be
time to think of getting ready to go to the Chase.
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