David, impatient of her unnatural taste in occupations, had
forsaken her. She could trace his course by a moving ripple across the
potato patch, just as a shark's movement seams the sea.

Forty beans.

Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors. Under the sun time
stands almost still. Only when every minute is a physical effort do you
discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one
hour is very little nearer to the evening than another. People who work
indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face.
Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and
when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over. We of Out of
Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands
are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and
sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn
before a blackbird's song is over. We know the length of days. And after
many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with
much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find
them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.

Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.

"I can't hoe any more," she said. "There are twenty-five more beans, but
I can't hoe them."

"Why should you?" asked the nearest fairy indifferently. "The foreman
never notices if we shirk. We always do."

"I said I would hoe this row," said Sarah Brown. "But I am accursed. It
is a good thing at least to know one's limitations."

Even in affliction she was prosy.

"I would advise you to go and have your dinner," another fairy said.
"Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now. But I left a
little lemonade in your bottle. Go under the trees and drink it."

"I can't move," said Sarah Brown.

"Sit there then," said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not
uprooting the weeds in their rows. Fairies are never ill. They have
immortal bodies, but no souls. If they see you in pain, they simply
think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their
faces.

The dragon undulated up the field. "Very nicely hoed," he said, looking
vaguely at Sarah Brown's row. "Much better than the other rows. Having
your dinner? Quite right too."

He never noticed the twenty-five unhoed beans.

Sarah Brown sat on the edge of a shore of green shadow, and a sea of sun
speckled with buttercups was