eams from the
thresher bows, are Michelmore and Neck--the little man who cannot read,
but can milk and whistle the hearts out of his cows till they follow him
like dogs. At the thresher's stern is Morris, the driver, selected
because of that utter reliability which radiates from his broad, handsome
face. His part is to attend the sacking of the three kinds of grain for
ever sieving out. He murmurs: "Busy work, sir!" and opens a little door
to show me how "the machinery does it all," holding a sack between his
knees and some string in his white teeth. Then away goes the sack--four
bushels, one hundred and sixty pounds of "genuines, seconds, or
seed"--wheeled by Cedric on a little trolley thing, to where
George-the-Gaul or Jim-the-Early-Saxon is waiting to bear it on his back
up the stone steps into the corn-chamber.

It has been raining in the night; the ground is a churn of straw and mud,
and the trees still drip; but now there is sunlight, a sweet air, and
clear sky, wine-coloured through the red, naked, beechtwigs tipped with
white untimely buds. Nothing can be more lovely than this late autumn
day, so still, save for the droning of the thresher and the constant
tinny chuckle of the grey, thin-headed Guinea-fowl, driven by this
business away from their usual haunts.

And soon the feeling that I knew would come begins creeping over me, the
sense of an extraordinary sanity in this never-ceasing harmonious labour
pursued in the autumn air faintly perfumed with wood-smoke, with the
scent of chaff, and whiffs from that black puffing-Billy; the sense that
there is nothing between this clean toil--not too hard but hard
enough--and the clean consumption of its clean results; the sense that
nobody except myself is in the least conscious of how sane it all is.
The brains of these sane ones are all too busy with the real affairs of
life, the disposition of their wages, anticipation of dinner, some girl,
some junketing, some wager, the last rifle match, and, more than all,
with that pleasant rhythmic nothingness, companion of the busy swing and
play of muscles, which of all states is secretly most akin to the deep
unconsciousness of life itself. Thus to work in the free air for the good
of all and the hurt of none, without worry or the breath of
acrimony--surely no phase of human life so nears the life of the truly
civilised community--the life of a hive of bees. Not one of these
working so sanely--unless it be Morris, who