WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 131 



layer upon layer of light, and the colour deepened by 

 these daily strokes. There was no bulletin to tell the 

 folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood 

 of the wheat to its hour of overflow. Yet there went 

 through the village a sense of expectation, and men said 

 to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one knew 

 the day — the last day of doom of the golden race ; every 

 one knew it was nigh. One evening there was a small 

 square piece cut at one side, a little notch, and two shocks 

 stood there in the twilight. Next day the village sent 

 forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and 

 slay. It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great 

 farmer gave the signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, 

 or child that did not talk of that. Well-to-do people 

 stopped their vehicles and walked out into the new 

 stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, 

 everybody — all to exchange a word or two with the 

 workers. These were so terribly in earnest at the start 

 they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of 

 the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were 

 so full, and so intense and one-minded in their labour, 

 that the great of the earth might come and go as 

 sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more 

 men were put on day by day, and women to bind the 

 sheaves, till the vast field held the village, yet they 

 seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of the golden 

 mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the 

 wheat fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of 

 corn. Your skin or mine could not have stood the 

 scratching of the straw, which is stiff and sharp, and the 

 burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No 

 lone could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he 

 I had been born and cradled in a cottage, and passed his 

 childhood bareheaded in July heats and January snows. 



K 2 



