132 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to 
wonder how these men and women could stand it, for 
the summer day is long, and they were there hours be- 
fore I was up.- The edge of the reap-hook had to be 
driven by force through the stout stalks like a sword, 
blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; 
the back stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery 
rays from a full disc on the head and neck. I think 
some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled up in 
their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll 
of the turban about the head, and perhaps they would 
have done better if they had adopted the custom of the 
South and wound a long scarf about the middle of the 
body, for they were very liable to be struck down with 
such internal complaints as come from great heat. Their 
necks grew black, much like black oak in old houses, 
Thcir 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 thinncr in the harvest-field, and shrunk together. 
—all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and- 
muscle remaining. 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 piece- 
work 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 
