IN THE HAYFIELD 143 



hay some twelve feet by six, I drive in the pike 

 and try to take up a pitch. The morsel I seize is 

 locked tightly under the surrounding hay, and 

 finally under the piece on which I stand. 



Pitching was awful, when a load rather too heavy 

 had to be thrust up from the shoulder. But here 

 it is like trying to lift the world with the muscles 

 of the stomach. Even when you pick up the 

 proper flake of hay that last put upon the load 

 you have hard work to poke it up to the rick above 

 you. And the seeds, including the detestable 

 spears of the lop grass, fall far more heavily here 

 than in the field. For they fall on the next bundle, 

 which, when it is, in turn, lifted, sends down the 

 accumulation and also its own quota. The atoms 

 stick on the perspiring skin, and cover one with 

 withered herbage, causing all sorts of expressions 

 of horror when, later, town people come to see it. 



The undoing of one load has quite undone me. 

 Some one tells me that I have earned twopence 

 in half an hour, which, on dividing the daily 

 wage of half a crown by the number of loads 

 usually carried, I find to be correct. 



I descend to the last rung of the ladder of the 

 idyllic labour of the field and go to work with 

 sundry women and an old man with a weak heart 

 arranging the little cocks for the pitchers to pick 

 up. One of the women has her hand bound with 

 a white rag. 



' Got a bad thumb ? ' I asked. 



'No,' she replied. 'But I do get terrible 



