The hemp breaker had just gone to the shock and torn away another
armful, dragging the rest down. Exhausting to the picked and
powerful, the work seemed easy to him; for he was a young man of
the greatest size and strength, moulded in the proportions which
Nature often chooses for her children of the soil among that
people. Striding rapidly back to his brake, the clumsy five-slatted
device of the pioneer Kentuckians, he raised the handle and threw
the armful of stalks crosswise between the upper and the lower
blades. Then swinging the handle high, with his body wrenched
violently forward and the strength of his good right arm put forth,
he brought it down. The CRASH, CRASH, CRASH could have been heard
far through the still air; for it is the office of those dull
blades to hack their way as through a bundle of dead rods.

A little later he stopped abruptly, with silent inquiry turning his
face to the sky: a raindrop had fallen on his hand. Two or three
drops struck his face as he waited. It had been very cold that
morning, too cold for him to come out to work. Though by noon it
had moderated, it was cold still; but out of the warmer currents of
the upper atmosphere, which was now the noiseless theatre of great
changes going forward unshared as yet by the strata below, sank
these icy globules of the winter rain. Their usual law is to freeze
during descent into the crystals of snow; rarely they harden after
they fall, covering the earth with sleet.

David, by a few quick circular motions of the wrist, freed his left
hand from the half-broken hemp, leaving the bundle trailing across
the brake. Then he hurried to the heap of well-cleaned fibre: that
must not be allowed to get wet. The dog leaped out and stood to one