192 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



wheat-fields are always more or less thickly choked with 

 those innumerable weeds of cultivation which no tillage 

 can ever eradicate : hardy Asiatic straylings whose seeds 

 have followed the grains and pulses over Europe and 

 America, and whose constitution successfully defies every 

 attempt to kill them down by fair means or foul. The 

 more you uproot them or burn them or sift their seeds, 

 the more pertinacious are those which still survive : for 

 by picking out the more conspicuous you only leave the 

 more insidious to spread and multiply ; and by cutting 

 off the roots from the sicklier you only leave the stronger 

 to send up fresh suckers and runners from their wounded 

 stocks. Yet, in spite of hard competition, and all this 

 wealth of intermingled weed, the corn now looks far 

 better than one could reasonably have hoped a week or 

 two ago ; and the shocks have filled out bravely for 

 the most part under the late fine weather : though there 

 are really many empty spikelets, I fear, on most of the 

 heads mere barren chaff, with no grain inside it. 

 Even in the field we have already cut there will be no 

 certainty as to the actual yield until we begin the regular 

 autumn threshing. 



The sample spikes that I have picked from beside 

 the path and roughly husked by rolling them between 

 my palms seem to promise a fairly large harvest in this 

 particular patch of corn-land. The grains are large and 

 full, and the number of fertile spikelets on each head is 

 pretty well up to the average. Few things are sweeter 

 than fresh wheat, chewed till it is reduced to the condition 

 of gluten ; and I suppose it must have been some such 

 chance trial on the part of some early savage that first 

 suggested the notion of cultivating the wild goat-grass 



