WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 133 
desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger 
the sum they would receive ; and what is man’s heart 
and brain to money? So hard, you see, is the pressure 
of human life that these miserables would have prayed 
on their knees for permission to tear their arms from 
the socket, and to scorch and shrivel themselves to 
charred human brands in the furnace of the sun. 
Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here 
was the wheat, the beauty of which I strive in vain to 
tell you, in the midst of the flowery summer, scourging 
them with the knot of necessity ; that which-should give 
life pulling the life out of them, rendering their exist- 
ence below that of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of 
living goes. Without doubt many a low mound in the 
churchyard—once visible, now level—was the sooner 
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible 
strain in the few weeks of the gold fever. This is 
human life, real human life—no rest, no calm enjoyment 
of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly 
offered by the gods—the hard fist of necessity for ever 
battering man to a shapeless and hopeless fall. 
The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land 
village is always the most populous, and every rood of 
land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains its man. The 
reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, 
and the carting and building of the ricks, and the glean- 
ing, there was something to do for every one, from the 
‘olde, olde, very olde man,’ the Thomas Parr of the 
hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little 
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk 
of wheat. The gleaners had a way of binding up the 
collected wheatstalks together so that a very large 
quantity was held tightly in a very small compass. 
The gleaner’s sheaf looked like the knot of a girl’s hair 
