134 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
woven in and bound. It was a tradition of the wheat: 
field handed down from generation to generation, a 
thing you could not possibly do unless you had been 
shown the secret—like the knots the sailors tie, a kind 
of hand art. The wheatstalk being thick at one end 
makes the sheaf heavier and more solid there, and soin 
any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a 
rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are 
built thick.in the middle and lessen gradually toward 
the top and toward the ground. The warm yellow of 
the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter’s day 
under agrey sky ; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm 
and comfortable, thrown down thickly in the yards for 
the roan cattle. 
After the village has gone back to its home still the 
work of the wheat is not over; there is the thatching 
with straw of last year, which is bleached and contrasts 
with the yellow of the fresh-gathered crop. Next the 
threshing ; and meantime the ploughs are at work, and 
very soon there is talk of seed-time. 
I used to look with wonder when I was a boy at 
the endless length of wall and the enormous roof of a 
great tithe barn. The walls of Spanish convents, with 
little or no window to break the vast monotony, some- 
what resemble it: the convent is a building, but does 
not look like a home; it is too big, too general. So 
this barn, with its few windows, seemed too immense to 
‘belong to any one man. The tithe barn has so com- 
pletely dropped out of modern life that it may be well 
to briefly mention that its use was to hold the tenth 
sheaf from every wheat-field in the parish. The parson’s 
tithe was the real actual tenth sheaf bodily taken from 
every field of corn in the district. A visible tenth, you 
see; avery solid thing. Imagine the vast hdap they 
