up--for only your amateur land-woman wears breeches. They all had hoes,
but were not using them much. They were singing curious old round songs
like summer dreams; you could hear strange fragments of phrases passing
from voice to voice. They took no notice of Sarah Brown, and she began
to work.

"Oh, my One," she said to David. "How happy this is. No wonder they
sing. Any one must sing working like this in great fields. Why, I even
remember that the Shropshire Lad whistled once by mistake, while
ploughing, on his own admission, until a fatalistic blackbird recalled
him to his usual tragic mind."

David sat uncomfortably on a broad bean, protesting against this new
mania. For a moment he had thought that she was seeking for a mouse with
some patent mouse-finding implement. He had even tried to help her, and
turned over a clod with a critical paw, but one sniff had showed him the
empty futility of the thing.

Sarah Brown hoed rather happily for a couple of hours, and then she
began to count the beans still waiting trustfully in the queue, waiting
to be attended to and freed from their embarrassments. There were
ninety-six, she decided, standing up ostensibly to greet an aeroplane.
She became very glad of the occasional aeroplanes that crossed above her
field, and gave her an excuse for standing with a straight back to watch
them. Aeroplanes, crossing singly or in wild-bird formations, are so
common in the sky of Faery that every one in those parts, while turning
his own eyes inevitably upwards, secretly thinks his neighbour
lamentably rustic and unsophisticated for looking at them.

Every aeroplane that crosses Faery feels, I suppose, the reflected magic