12f 



WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 



I. 



If you will look at a grain of wheat you will sec that it 

 seems folded up : it has crossed its arms and rolled itself 

 up in a cloak, a fold of which forms a groove, and so 

 gone to sleep. If you look at it some time, as people in 

 the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or 

 the magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you 

 can almost trace a miniature human being in the oval of 

 the grain. It is narrow at the top, where the head would 

 be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again 

 down towards the feet ; a tiny man or woman has 

 wrapped itself round about with a garment and 

 settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the dead 

 ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves 

 in a sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their 

 bodies against the chilliness of the night. Down in the 

 south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there 

 in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and 

 lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, 

 in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might re- 

 tain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of 

 human organism through endless ages, till at last the 

 gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the 

 mummy is folded in its cloth. And I do not know really 



