124 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
gold. are for ever prowling about collecting every golderi 
coin they can scent out and shipping it over sea. And 
what does not go abroad is in consequence of this great 
drain sharply locked up in the London safes as reserves 
against paper, and cannot be utilised in enterprises or 
manufacture. Therefore trade stands still, and factories 
are closed, and ship-yards are idle, and beautiful vessels 
are stored up doing nothing by hundreds in dock ; coal 
mines left to be filled with water, and furnaces blown 
out. Therefore there is bitter distress and starvation, 
and cries for relief works, and one meal a day for Board 
school children, and the red flag of Socialism is unfurled. 
All because of these little grains of wheat. 
They talked of bringing artillery, with fevered lips, 
to roar forth shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not 
Gatling guns? The artillery did not come for very 
shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of 
infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to. prod 
folk into moving on. All about these little grains of 
wheat. 
These thoughts came into my mind in the winter 
afternoon at the edge of a level corn-field, with the 
copper-sheathed spire of the village church on my right, 
the sun going down on the left. The copper did not 
gleam, it was dull and brown, no better than discoloured 
wood, patched with pieces of later date and another 
shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter, some of 
these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the 
reddish brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. 
The very rooks are black, and the starlings and the 
wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour at a dis- 
tance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in 
Russia, and even in France, and why not in our rare 
sunshine? Once now and then you seca gilded weather- 
