Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
salute the reaper and say, "All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall." The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles them
to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
the dust of the world flushed away.

Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.

Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature's travail which
is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought