AUGUST 



Harvest Time 



AN England without wheat harvest is unimagin- 

 able. No figures or fancies can enable us to 

 think out such a land. If figures tell us we 

 could be well and stable for long without our wheat 

 harvest, they lie. This thing is bound up with the 

 genius of our people more than even the oak. The 

 endurance and grit of peasant character not quite 

 so extinct to-day as some suppose belong to it. 

 We cannot talk much to a fair specimen of the farm 

 hand in corn-growing districts without seeing that 

 the wheat harvest is root and branch of him. Now 

 the grand old festival of labour is once again in full 

 swing. Association counts greatly in the life of a 

 country, and here are priceless centuries of it ; to 

 strike out the whole fabric of ancient architecture in 

 England would not strike at national association and 

 feeling more surely than to strike out the wheat 

 harvest. Then there is the consideration of beauty 

 and landscape, which are of high importance and 

 no crop has the wealth of beauty that is in the 

 wheat. 



The height and great bulk of the clean, ripe crop, 

 and pure yellow of its valued straw, the leagues of 

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