Of
Yore The Rich Man Is Said, In The Roman Classic, To Have Measured His
Money, So Here You Might Have Measured It By The Rood.
The sunbeams sank
deeper and deeper into the wheatears, layer upon layer of light, and the
colour deepened by these daily strokes.
There was no bulletin to tell the
folk of its progress, no Nileometer to mark the rising flood of the wheat
to its hour of overflow. Yet there went through the village a sense of
expectation, and men said to each other, 'We shall be there soon.' No one
knew the day - the last day of doom of the golden race; every one knew it
was nigh. One evening there was a small square piece cut at one side, a
little notch, and two shocks stood there in the twilight. Next day the
village sent forth its army with their crooked weapons to cut and slay.
It used to be an era, let me tell you, when a great farmer gave the
signal to his reapers; not a man, woman, or child that did not talk of
that. Well-to-do people stopped their vehicles and walked out into the
new stubble. Ladies came, farmers, men of low degree, everybody - all to
exchange a word or two with the workers. These were so terribly in
earnest at the start they could scarcely acknowledge the presence even of
the squire. They felt themselves so important, and were so full, and so
intense and one-minded in their labour, that the great of the earth might
come and go as sparrows for aught they cared.
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