ABSTRACT
IT was on a sultry evening in the month of August, when the heat having kept her children within the whole day, Mrs. Woodfield accompanied 67them for a walk to a farm house,a with the inhabitants of which she had some business. They passed through fields on their way, in some of which the wheat was cutting, in others it was already cut, and the leasers22 were gathering up the scattered ears. Elizabeth looked around for the lovely form of Lavinia, as Thomson has represented her;23 but no such figure was to be found among the groups of children and old persons dispersed about the field. When she saw a farmer drive in his herd of hogs, before these unhappy people had gathered the scanty refuse that was left them; when she saw their disappointment, of which they did not dare to complain, but dejectedly and sorrowfully left the field, she was not only filled with indignation, but felt disposed to try the experiment Caroline had talked of, with the card-playing old lady; and to have said, ‘Be not too narrow, husbandman; but fling From the full sheaf, with charitable stealth, The liberal handful. Think, oh! grateful think! How good the God of harvest is to you, Who pours abundance o’er your flowing fields! While these unhappy partners of your kind Wide hover round you, like the fowls of heaven, And ask their humble dole. The various turns Of fortune ponder; think your sons may want What now, with hard reluctance, faint, ye give.’24
