242 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. 



fleck of cloud in the sky, which to my fancy might be 

 a Cupid on a blue panel, and seeing it smiled in the 

 midst of the corn, wiping his blackened face, for he 

 knew it meant dry weather. Heat, and the dust of the 

 straw, the violent labour had darkened his face from 

 brown almost to blackness — a more than swarthiness, 

 a blackness. The stray cloud was spreading out in 

 filaments, each thread drawn to a fineness that ended 

 presently in disappearance. It was a sign to him of 

 continued sunshine and the prosperity of increased 

 wages. The sun from whose fiery brilliance I escaped 

 into the shadow was to him a welcome friend; his 

 neck was bare to the fierceness of the sun. His heart 

 was gladdened because the sky promised him permis- 

 sion to labour till the sinews of his fingers stifiened in 

 their crooked shape (as they held the reaping hook), 

 and he could hardly open them to grasp the loaf he 

 had gained. 



So men laboured of old time, whether with plough 

 or sickle or pruning-hook, in the days when Augustan 

 Virgil heard the garrulous swallow, still garrulous. 

 An endless succession of labour, under the brightness 

 of summer, under the gloom of winter ; to my thought 

 it is a sadness even in the colour and light and 

 glow of this hour of sun, this ceaseless labour, repeating 

 the furrow, reiterating the blow, the same furrow, 

 the same stroke — shall we never know how to 

 lighten it, how to live with the flowers, the swallows, 

 the sweet delicious shade, and the murmur of the 

 stream ? Not the blackened reaper only, but the 

 crowd whose low hum renders the fountain inaudible, 

 the nameless and unknown crowd of this immense city 



