292 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



The notice reminds him that even now the workhouse 

 endures, men are imprisoned for debt, and ' in the West 

 End of London a poor woman, an ironer, being in debt, 

 her six children's clothes were seized.' He cries out upon 

 ' the enormous weight of ecclesiastical bricks and mortar 

 that cumbers the land,' while the vagrom man with 

 nothing in his pocket must not sleep in the open. Walk- 

 ing in the wheatfields, he remembers how the reapers 

 reaped when he was a boy : 



' Their necks grew black, much like black oak in old 

 houses. Their open chests were always bare, and flat, 

 and stark, and never rising with rounded, bust-like muscle 

 as the Greek statues of athletes, 



' The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, 

 tough as ash, seemed cased in leather. They grew visibly 

 thinner in the harvest-field, and shrunk together — all flesh 

 disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle remain- 

 ing. Never was such work. The wages were low in 

 those days, and it is not long ago, either — I mean the all- 

 year-round wages. The reaping was piecework, at so 

 much per acre — like solid gold to men and women who 

 had lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. 

 So they worked and slaved, and tore at the wheat as if 

 they were seized with a frenzy, the heat, the aches, the 

 illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the air, the 

 stomach hungry again before the meal was over. It was 

 nothing. No song, no laugh, no stay — on from morn till 

 night, possessed with a maddened desire to labour, for 

 the more they could cut the larger the sum they would 

 receive ; and what is man's heart and brain to money ? 

 So hard, you see, is the pressure of human life that these 

 miserables would have prayed on their knees for permis- 

 sion to tear their arms from the socket, and to scorch and 

 shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the furnace 

 of the sun. 



' Does it not seem bitter that it should be so ? Here 

 was the wheat, the beauty of which I strive in vain to 

 tell you, in the midst of the flowery summer, scourging 



