WALKS IN THE WHEA T-FIELDS. 13 
layer upon layer of light, and the colour deepened by 
these daily strokes. There was no bulletin to tell the 
folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood 
of the wheat to its hour of overflow. Yet there went 
through the village a sense of expectation, and men said 
to each other, ‘We shall be there soon.’ No one knew 
the day—the last day of doom of the golden race ; every 
one knew it was nigh. One evening there was a small’ 
square piece cut at one side, a little notch, and two shocks 
stood there in the twilight. Next day the village sent 
forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and 
slay. It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great 
farmer gave the signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, 
or child that did not talk of that. Well-to-do people 
stopped their vehicles and walked out into the new 
stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, 
everybody—all to exchange a word or two with the 
workers, .These were so terribly in earnest at the start 
they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of 
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were 
so full, and so intense and one-minded in their labour, 
that the great of the earth might come and go as 
sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more 
men were put on day by day, and women to bind the 
sheaves, till the vast field held the village, yet they 
seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of the golden 
mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the 
wheat fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of 
corn. Your skin or mine could not have stood the 
scratching of the straw, which is stiff and sharp, and the 
burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No 
one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he 
had been: born and cradled in a cottage, and passed his 
childhood bareheaded in July heats and January snows. 
k2 
