ared hard enough, they must
eventually see how the miracle was accomplished. And from the ground yet
more men picked up the bundles on their pitchforks and tossed them to
men who were building the straw-ricks at the same time as the
corn-stacks were diminishing. Little boys bore away the chaff gathered
into sacks or swept it into a golden pile, feather-soft, from which
smoke-like whirls wreathed in the little breezes.

In line with the thresher stood the engine, looped to it by trembling
curves of driving-belt, that wavered like a great black ribbon from the
driving-wheel of the traction-engine to that of the thresher, and that
showed a line of quivering light along its edge. A trail of dark smoke
blew ceaselessly from the traction-engine, staining the blue of the sky,
against which it faded and died away. The engine rocked a little
unceasingly upon its wheels as it stood, even as the thresher did, and
its governor whirled round and round like a demented spirit, so fast
that its short arms with the blobs on their ends made a little dark
circle in the air. A pool of steamy water lying in the grass beneath the
waste-pipe gave off white wreaths that wavered upwards and fell again,
while from a huge black butt upon wheels the greedy boiler sucked up
more and more through a coiling tube that glittered like a serpent.

It was dark, ugly, smelly, the traction-engine, but it was what endowed
the murmurous thresher with life. In spite of its dirt and oil and
dripping secretions, it kept going that wonderful life which was filling
the world, the rising and falling hum, the streams of pouring grain, the
swelling sacks, the great glossy bundles of straw, the blown column of
chaff, the cloud of dancing golden magic bees that made of the air an
element transmuted, glorified.

With all the threshings he had seen, it seemed to Ishmael that he had
still never seen any quite so wonderful, so radiant, so rich to eye and
ear and nostril, as this; and to little Jimmy, who had never been there
for guldise before, it was a golden miracle. He stood, silent for once,
transfixed, fronting the wondrous monster who did so many different
things at once with such perfect ease, never making a mistake or getting
out of time....

He helped, too, to carry out "crowse"--the midmorning lunch--to the men,
and he wandered about with the crowds of stray children and patted the
unresponsive dogs, and was admired by the women and bored by them, and
himself