WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. — 141 
flail went on through the reigns of how many kings and 
queens I do not know, they are all forgotten, God wot, 
down to the edge of our own times. The good old days 
when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held 
and pamphlets printed on the frozen: Thames, when 
comets were understood as fate, and when the corn laws 
starved half England—those were the times of the flail. 
Every barn—and there were then barns on every farm, 
think of the number—had its threshing-floor opposite the 
great open doors, and all the dread winter through the 
flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their most 
cherished privilege to get that employment in the Bitter 
dark hours of the hungry months. It was life itself to 
them: to stand there swinging that heavy bit of wood 
all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and drink, 
for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as 
a civil list pension nowadays, for you see there were 
crowds of men in these corn villages, but only a few 
of them could get barns to snop away in. 
The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed 
with leather. They had flails of harder make than that, 
harder than the iron flails used in the wars of old times, 
ze. Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on the back, 
and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn 
laws are gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries 
now are afloat, steam threshes our ricks—in a few days 
doing what used to take months, and you would think 
that this simple implement would have disappeared for 
ever. Instead of which flails are still in use on small 
farms—which it is now the cry to multiply—for knocking 
out little quantities of grain for feeding purposes. The 
gleaners used to use them to thresh out their collections. 
There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody 
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if 
