all day except at food-times,
sounding like some vast wasp held captive and booming unceasingly--some
great dragon of a wasp, as Jimmy put it.

They went out together, but Lissa insisted on going to find grandpa
first and helping him on with his light coat; then they all three went
out across the farmyard and through the open gate into the field.

The thresher stood humming and palpitant, its great bulk painted a dull
pinkish colour like a locust, but faded and stained with rust. Upon its
trembling roof the piles of oats, thrown by the men on the stack
alongside, showed a pure golden; above the sky was dazzlingly blue, and
in it the white cumuli rode brilliantly. The men working on the top of
the thresher showed bronzed against the luminous blue, their shirts as
brightly white as the clouds, the shadows under their slouched hats
lying soft and blue across their clear eyes.

Poised on the stacks the men were busy feeding the sheaves to the men
on the thresher, who in their turn tilted them into the great concave
drum in its hidden heart. From one end poured out steady streams of
golden grain, into the hanging sacks that boys took away as they filled,
bringing in their place empty sacks that hung limply for a minute and
then began to fill, swelling and puffing out to sudden solidity. The
sieves beneath the thresher shook back and forth, back and forth,
tirelessly, while chaff poured away from the open jaws at the side in a
fine dusty column of pale gold, from which the topmost husks blew up
into the air, so that it was always filled with a whirling cloud that
danced and gleamed in the sunlight like a swarm of golden bees.

At the far end of the thresher, away from the traction-engine, the
fumbling lips of the shakers, mouthing in and out beneath their little
penthouse, pushed out the beaten straw into the maw of an automatic
trusser, which Ishmael had only bought that year and which he was
watching eagerly. For one moment the formless tumble of straw, pushed
out by those waggling wooden lips above, was lost in the trusser, then
it shot forth below in bound bundles that had been made and tied by the
hidden hands of the machinery within, to the never-ceasing wonder of the
gaping children, who stared at the solemnly revolving spools of string
in the little pigeon-holes on either side and from them back to where
the string was perpetually disappearing, sucked into the interstices of
the trusser, as though, if only they st