payment instead. The machine breaks and bruises many grains of corn,
which are thereby damaged for seed or malting, whereas the less urgent
flail leaves them intact.

The sound of the thrashing machine gives an impression to outsiders of
brisk and remunerative work, but it is cheerful to the farmer only
when high prices are ruling. Far otherwise was it for many years
before the War, when corn-growers heard only its moaning, despondent
note, telling anything but a flattering tale, only varied by an
occasional angry growl, when irregular feeding choked its satiated
appetite.

From the aesthetic standpoint uncouth and noisy machines, such as
mowers and reapers, cannot be compared to a lusty team of men with
scythes, in their white shirts, backed by the flowering meadows; or a
sunny field of busy harvesters facing a golden wall of corn, and
leaving behind them the fresh-shorn stubble dotted with sheaves and
nicely balanced shocks. The rattle of the machines, too, is discordant
and out of harmony with the peaceful countryside.

It is related of Ruskin that, hearing the insistent rattle of a mowing
machine in a meadow adjoining his home by the beautiful Coniston
Water, and his sense of the fitting being outraged, he interviewed the
owner, and, by an offer to pay the trifling difference between machine
and hand labour, induced him to discontinue the annoyance.

As to the relative cost of machine and hand wheat-cutting, quite early
in my farming I obtained the opinion of a distinguished farmer, then
well known on the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society, Mr.
Charles Randell, of Chadbury, near Evesham, on the subject: "If you