of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many
a low mound in the churchyard--once visible, now level--was the sooner
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few
weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life--no rest, no
calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly
offered by the gods--the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to
a shapeless and hopeless fall.

The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the
most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains
its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and
the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was
something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the
Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The
gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so
that a very large quantity was held tightly in a very small compass. The
gleaner's sheaf looked like the knot of a girl's hair woven in and bound.
It was a tradition of the wheat field handed down from generation to
generation, a thing you could not possibly do unless you had been shown
the secret--like the knots the sailors tie, a kind of hand art. The
wheatstalk being thick at one end makes the sheaf heavier and more solid
there, and so in any manner of fastening it or stacking it, it takes a
rounded shape like a nine-pin; the round ricks are built thick in the
middle and lessen gradually toward the top and toward the ground. The
warm yellow of the straw is very pleasant to look at on a winter's day
under a grey sky; so, too, the straw looks nice and warm and comfortable,
thrown down thickly in the yards for the roan cattle.

After the village has gone back to its home still the work of the wheat