small black puffing engine astern;
and there, all around it, is that conglomeration of unsentimental labour
which invests all the crises of farm work with such fascination. The
crew of the farm is only five all told, but to-day they are fifteen, and
none strangers, save the owners of the travelling thresher.

They are working without respite and with little speech, not at all as if
they had been brought together for the benefit of some one else's corn,
but as though they, one and all, had a private grudge against Time and a
personal pleasure in finishing this job, which, while it lasts, is
bringing them extra pay and most excellent free feeding. Just as after a
dilatory voyage a crew will brace themselves for the run in, recording
with sudden energy their consciousness of triumph over the elements, so
on a farm the harvests of hay and corn, sheep-shearing, and threshing
will bring out in all a common sentiment, a kind of sporting energy, a
defiant spurt, as it were, to score off Nature; for it is only a
philosopher here and there among them, I think, who sees that Nature is
eager to be scored off in this fashion, being anxious that some one
should eat her kindly fruits.

With ceremonial as grave as that which is at work within the thresher
itself, the tasks have been divided. At the root of all things,
pitchforking from the stack, stands--the farmer, moustached, and always
upright was he not in the Yeomanry?--dignified in a hard black hat, no
waistcoat, and his working coat so ragged that it would never cling to
him but for pure affection. Between him and the body of the machine are
five more pitch forks, directing the pale flood of raw material. There,
amongst them, is poor Herd, still so sad from his summer loss, plodding
doggedly away. To watch him even now makes one feel how terrible is that
dumb grief which has never learned to moan. And there is George Yeoford,
almost too sober; and Murdon plying his pitchfork with a supernatural
regularity that cannot quite dim his queer brigand's face of dark, soft
gloom shot with sudden humours, his soft, dark corduroys and battered
hat. Occasionally he stops, and taking off that hat, wipes his
corrugated brow under black hair, and seems to brood over his own
regularity.

Down here, too, where I stand, each separate function of the thresher has
its appointed slave. Here Cedric rakes the chaff pouring from the side
down into the chaff-shed. Carting the straw that str