COUNTRY LIFE
July Promise There are summers when hay-time and harvest overlap. If they overlap this year it will be rather because of the earliness of harvest than of the lateness of hay-time. There can have been few sum- mers when hay was made so quickly and so easily or under such cloudless skies. The crop is generally very good. Oats are turning colour as I write; wheats, which generally wintered splendidly, have just a touch of silvery-fawn. There is every prospect of an early harvest, though it rather looks as if beans, potatoes and roots may be light. Flax looks good and gives a new touch of delicacy to the land, the blue flowers fresh as water. Fruit is generally bad, and will be fair only in isolated districts, but there is magnificent promise in nuts. Hazels appear to be heavy, and the sweet-chestnut blossom it now the glory of the southern countryside. The long olive-gold tas- sels on the high-gleaming trees light up the woodlands ; the scent is thick and over-sweet in the hot air. Hops look first-rate, though there is still a long season between now and September, and for those who like to be superstitious prophets about hard winters there is one of the heaviest crops of holly-berries for years. Meanwhile the pro- tection of ripening corn-crops against incendiaries is, as I pointed out last summer, a very important thing. No organisation appears to have been created to meet what might well be, after a prolonged period of drought, a costly emergency. In America, I believe, regular fire- watchers are employed in forest and corn areas, and it is probable that the Canadians have some advice to offer us here.
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