260 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



but their beauty, I think, is meretricious set against 

 the beauty of ripe wheat. Yet the term wheat-gold 

 must stand. We cannot dispense with it as we 

 willingly would with the watery and sentimental one 

 of silver applied to the moon or the running stream. 

 Wheat-gold is a colour of itself which nothing else 

 has, and nothing perhaps deserves. It carries with it 

 that idea of most solid worth, which the wheat cannot 

 lose even in places where so folk say it is now 

 grown for its straw. No garden ever equalled a 

 perfect wheat field in sheeted colour which appeals 

 to heart and brain as well as eye. Acres of poppy 

 or charlock or sainfoin, with all their pageantry, do 

 not move me quite as the perfect wheat crop does, 

 when the scythe is clearing the edges and corners 

 of the field for the machine cutter and binder, and 

 preparing a spot for the elevator and the stack. But 

 one condition is indispensable it must be a strong 

 thick, clean crop. Not a poppy nor cockle nor scabious 

 flower must thrust up its trespassing head level with 

 the surface of the wheat-gold. A patch of thistles in 

 such a place is a crime against cultivation. A thin 

 crop sprent with flowers and grasses can only dis- 

 gust us. 



Flowers, even flowers intrinsically lovely, mixed 

 with the wheat are ugly growths ; they are inquilines ; 

 the spots where they flourish in the wheat field, after 

 the straw has grown three feet high and is heavily 

 weighted, are scabs. This need not apply to the 



