I have always understood that the plan originated in something that Addison had read, or in some picture that he had seen in one of the magazines in the garret.

But the old Squire, who had a spice of Yankee inventiveness in him, had improved on Addison's first notion by suggesting a glass roof, set aslant to a south exposure, so as to utilize the rays of the sun when it did shine.
The haymaker was simply a long shed built against the south side of the barn.

The front and the ends were boarded up to a height of eight feet from the ground.

At that height strong cedar cross poles were laid, six inches apart, so as to form a kind of rack, on which the freshly mown grass could be pitched from a cart.
The glass roof was put on as soon as the glass arrived; it slanted at an angle of perhaps forty degrees from the front of the shed up to the eaves of the barn.

The rafters, which were twenty-six feet in length, were hemlock scantlings eight inches wide and two inches thick, set edgewise; the panes of glass, which were eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches long, were laid in rows upon the rafters like shingles.