XIMcCarthy was playing his fiddle from the wintergreen beside the bog. The last of the hayers had gone home in creaking wagons, whistling to be done so early of an August day. Ase stood alone in the high south opening of the hay mow. The new-mown timothy and clover smelled as sweet as honey. The late afternoon sun reached into it, as though long fingers fondled golden hair. Ase liked the color and texture of hay at any time, even toward the end of its life, when brown and dry as an old woman. It was most pleasant at this moment of its fresh cutting, piled thick and yellow in the big shadowy loft. Soon the mice would breed there and squeak and scurry, the barn cats would climb the ladder to hunt them, the hens would leave their own house with its trim rows of troughs to steal their nests in
