398 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



They often cook their food like gipsies on fires in open-air 

 encampments. They sleep on occasion in the straw from 

 which they have threshed the grain. They are coming to 

 possess some of the gipsy qualities. In the exercise of their 

 profession they usually give the preference to the bigger 

 farmers, with the result on the country landscape that the 

 bigger yards disappear first : sometimes, if wheat is chiefly 

 grown, within a few weeks of the ending of harvest. The 

 small men, who never dream of resorting to old methods, 

 have to wait for the machines till they can get them. A 

 small holder may find his stack half devoured before he can 

 get it threshed. The rats have harboured in it and made 

 excursions against his poultry and eggs ; and he has to wait 

 for the money which probably he seriously needs. In 

 Ireland, a country of small holders, the haystacks are a 

 feature of the landscape, very eloquent of the hand-to-mouth 

 life of the people. As winter advances the round stacks 

 gradually become thinner and thinner at the base, till 

 finally they resemble mushrooms. They have served ever 

 since winter began as a browsing-place and a shelter for the 

 stock who thus eat rations never served out, as the poor do 

 in London slums, where it is not the custom to have meal- 

 times. In the end, the stacks as often as not topple over, 

 having become too heavy in the head. You may see them 

 in every state, from the dwindling but erect stack to the 

 leaning tower, to the collapse. No emblem tells a more 

 graphic tale of the state of the country than its stacks. The 

 greatest contrast is between these tottering haystacks or 

 amorphous cornstacks of the small freeholder, and the tight, 

 well-clipped, geometric stacks, round or rectangular with 

 pentagon ends and projecting eaves, such as you see on the 

 great fen farms of Cambridgeshire, or indeed in any English 

 county. Both seem quite integral to the landscape. 



