ly minuet, he
was there to watch. All day he went from field to field and watched the
strong young labourers building; those on the ground tossing to those on
the stooks, while the air was full of a deep rustling. One man would
crawl about on the growing mow, arranging each sheaf as it was tossed up
to him, so that its feathery crown lay towards the centre, away from
chance of rain. At last it was all finished--all the precious grain
tucked away out of possible harm in the heart of the arishmows, save for
the feathery bunch at the crest that fastened all off with a flourish.
It had been a lovely task, the building of the arishmows, for, like all
work to do with the land, it was the perfection of rhythm, and this,
added to the unending flow of tossing and packing, held always that
lovely rustling of stalk and ear as an accompaniment of music to the
action.

Not many days later and the stately arishmows were destroyed and the
sheaves brought in on waggons and built into great stacks in the field
which lay next to the farmyard, where the threshing would take place.
There was a pile of the dredge-corn, another of deeply-golden oats, a
third of the greyer-tinted wheat, which was a little smaller than the
other two, though that also was as high as the roof of the barn.

In the cleared space between the stacks the great steam thresher would
be brought; but now the men who would help in that work were still all
part of the weaving pattern of stacking; one man tossed from the
high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack,
caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to
the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed
the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his
twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed,
always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again
--so often before, but never so keenly as now--was Ishmael struck with
the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only thing that
moved so rhythmically towards harvest; this inevitable flow, this deeply
necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and
building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the
garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and
when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust?

CHAPTER VI

THRESHING

That day had come to which the