WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 
I. 
IF you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it 
seems folded up: it has crossed its armsand rolled itself 
up in a cloak, a fold of which forms a groove, and so 
gone to sleep.. If you look at it some time, as people in 
the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or 
the magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you 
can almost trace a miniature human being in the oval of 
the grain. It is narrow at the top, where the head would 
be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again 
down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has 
wrapped itself round about with a garment and 
settled to slumber. Up in the far north, where the dead 
ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves 
in a sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their 
bodies against the chilliness of the night. Down in the 
south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there 
in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and 
lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, 
in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might re- 
': tain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of 
human organism through endless ages, till at last the 
gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the 
mummy is folded in its cloth, And I do not know really 
