er itself, and check
itself in the act of some new paroxysm. It remembers the European War
that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its
coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly. The eastern sky becomes once more
its highway instead of its trapeze. It collects its wits, emits a few
contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps beyond sight.

Whenever this happened, the female fairies behaved in a very plebeian
and forward manner, waving their hoes at each machine, encouraging it by
brazen gestures to further extravagances, and striving to reach its
hearing with loud shrill cries. There was very little difference
between these fairies and other lady war-workers. In fact they were only
distinguishable by their stature and by the empty and innocent
expression of their faces. Also perhaps by their tuneful singing, and by
a habit of breaking out suddenly into country dances between the
bean-rows.

Sarah Brown, who worked a great deal more industriously than any one
else in sight, soon overtook them, and while conscious of that touch of
interested scorn always felt by the One towards the Herd, found relief
in watching their vagaries, and presently in speaking to them.

For she needed relief, poor Sarah Brown, her disabilities were catching
her up; a hoarse contralto cough was reminding her of many doctors'
warnings against manual work. She could feel, so to speak, the distant
approaching tramp of that pain in her side under whose threat she had
lived all her life. But there were seventy-five beans yet.

The note of her hoe, a high note not quite true pitched, clamoured
monotonously upon her brain. Three blisters and a half were persecuting
her hands.

"Let them blist," she said defiantly. "This row of beans was given me to
hoe, and Death itself shall not take it from me."

She could almost imagine she saw Death, waiting for her tactfully beyond
the last bean. She had no sense of proportion. She was so very weary of
having her life interrupted by her weakness that anything that she had
begun to do always seemed to her worth finishing, even under torture. To
finish every task, in spite of all hindrance, was her only ambition, but
it was almost always frustrated.

Seventy more beans. "Three score and ten," thought Sarah Brown. "What's
that? Only a lifetime." She bent to her work.

A great clump of buttercups bestrode her bean row, and as after a
struggle she dragged its protesting roots from the earth, something