creeping over me, the
sense of an extraordinary sanity in this never-ceasing harmonious labour
pursued in the autumn air faintly perfumed with wood-smoke, with the
scent of chaff, and whiffs from that black puffing-Billy; the sense that
there is nothing between this clean toil--not too hard but hard
enough--and the clean consumption of its clean results; the sense that
nobody except myself is in the least conscious of how sane it all is.
The brains of these sane ones are all too busy with the real affairs of
life, the disposition of their wages, anticipation of dinner, some girl,
some junketing, some wager, the last rifle match, and, more than all,
with that pleasant rhythmic nothingness, companion of the busy swing and
play of muscles, which of all states is secretly most akin to the deep
unconsciousness of life itself. Thus to work in the free air for the good
of all and the hurt of none, without worry or the breath of
acrimony--surely no phase of human life so nears the life of the truly
civilised community--the life of a hive of bees. Not one of these
working so sanely--unless it be Morris, who will spend his Sunday
afternoon on some high rock just watching sunlight and shadow drifting on
the moors--not one, I think, is distraught by perception of his own
sanity, by knowledge of how near he is to Harmony, not even by
appreciation of the still radiance of this day, or its innumerable fine
shades of colour. It is all work, and no moody consciousness--all work,
and will end in sleep.

I leave them soon, and make my way up the stone steps to the "corn
chamber," where tranquillity is crowned. In the whitewashed room the
corn lies in drifts and ridges, three to four feet deep, all silvery-dun,
like some remote sand desert, lifeless beneath the moon. Here it lies,
and into it, staggering under the sacks, George-the-Gaul and
Jim-the-Early Saxon tramp up to their knees, spill the sacks over their
heads, and out again; and above where their feet have plunged the patient
surface closes again, smooth. And as I stand there in the doorway,
looking at that silvery corn drift, I think of the whole process, from
seed sown to the last sieving into this tranquil resting-place. I think
of the slow, dogged ploughman, with the crows above him on the wind; of
the swing of the sower's arm, dark up against grey sky on the steep
field. I think of the seed snug-burrowing for safety, and its mysterious
ferment under the warm Spring rain