drink, he made his way out again into the moonlight. We watched him
across the lawn and path, and through the gate, till his footfalls died
out there in the field, and his figure was lost in the black shadow of
the holly hedge.

And the night was so beautiful, so utterly, glamourously beautiful, with
its star-flowers, and its silence, and its trees clothed in moonlight.
All was tranquil as a dream of sleep. But it was long before our hearts,
wandering with poor Herd, would let us remember that she had slipped away
into so beautiful a dream.

The dead do not suffer from their rest in beauty. But the living---!
1911.

THRESHING

When the drone of the thresher breaks through the autumn sighing of trees
and wind, or through that stillness of the first frost, I get restless
and more restless, till, throwing down my pen, I have gone out to see.
For there is nothing like the sight of threshing for making one feel
good--not in the sense of comfort, but at heart. There, under the pines
and the already leafless elms and beech-trees, close to the great stacks,
is the big, busy creature, with its small black puffing engine astern;
and there, all around it, is that conglomeration of unsentimental labour
which invests all the crises of farm work with such fascination. The
crew of the farm is only five all told, but to-day they are fifteen, and
none strangers, save the owners of the travelling thresher.

They are working without respite and with little speech, not at all as if
they had been brought together for the benefit of some one else's corn,
but as though they, one and all, had a private grudge against Time and a
personal pleasure in finishing this job, which, while it lasts, is
bringing them extra pay and most excellent free feeding. Just as after a
dilatory voyage a crew will brace themselves for the run in, recording
with sudden energy their consciousness of triumph over the elements, so
on a farm the harvests of hay and corn, sheep-shearing, and threshing
will bring out in all a common sentiment, a kind of sporting energy, a
defiant spurt, as it were, to score off Nature; for it is only a
philosopher here and there among them, I think, who sees that Nature is
eager to be scored off in this fashion, being anxious that some one
should eat her kindly fruits.

With ceremonial as grave as that which is at work within the thresher
itself, the tasks have been divided. At the root of all things,
pitchforking from