It was a beautiful ordinance of the Pentateuch that the first gathered fruits of summer should be consecrated to God, and that the harvest, earth's great festival, should be religiously solemnized.

It is a great epoch that brings us once again the chief sustenance of life, the common nourishment of all classes, the poor as well as the rich man's food. It is a great epoch that sends forth from every village and hamlet throngs of merry workers filling our fields and valleys with peaceful labour. It is a great epoch when in humble dwellings throughout the land there is the promise of bread for the coming winter—when toiling men and women may gather round their lowly hearth and caress their children with a smile upon their faces and a smile within their hearts. Life's dearest blessings, however, by their very frequence, sink into comparative insignificance. We almost require grief by the side of joy, shade by the side of light, to appreciate to their full importance the gifts of Providence.

Even when we recognise the good, we fail to trace it back to its source; even whilst we rejoice, the great Giver is forgotten.

As, year after year, the summer sun shines upon our fields, and the summer rain fertilizes them; as the green corn ripens till it waves its golden hair joyously in the noontide breeze, and harvest comes with its promise of plenty, with its hopes for winter frosts and snows, the gratitude awakened by the unutterable blessing is but feeble as compared with the good it secures.