expectation, and men said to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one
knew the day--the last day of doom of the golden race; every one knew it
was nigh. One evening there was a small square piece cut at one side, a
little notch, and two shocks stood there in the twilight. Next day the
village sent forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and slay.
It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great farmer gave the
signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, or child that did not talk of
that. Well-to-do people stopped their vehicles and walked out into the
new stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody--all to
exchange a word or two with the workers. These were so terribly in
earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so
intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might
come and go as sparrows for aught they cared. More men and more men were
put on day by day, and women to bind the sheaves, till the vast field
held the village, yet they seemed but a handful buried in the tunnels of
the golden mine: they were lost in it like the hares, for as the wheat
fell, the shocks rose behind them, low tents of corn. Your skin or mine
could not have stood the scratching of the straw, which is stiff and
sharp, and the burning of the sun, which blisters like red-hot iron. No
one could stand the harvest-field as a reaper except he had been born and
cradled in a cottage, and passed his childhood bareheaded in July heats
and January snows. I was always fond of being out of doors, yet I used to
wonder how these men and women could stand it, for the summer day is
long, and they were there hours before I was up. The edge of the
reap-hook had to be driven by force through the stout stalks like a
sword, blow after blow, minute after minute, hour after hour; the back
stooping, and the broad sun throwing his fiery rays from a full disc on
the head and neck. I think some of them used to put handkerchiefs doubled
up in their hats as pads, as in the East they wind the long roll of the