Here was the wheat, the
beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of
The flowery
summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give
life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that
of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes. Without doubt many
a low mound in the churchyard - once visible, now level - was the sooner
raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few
weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life - no rest, no
calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly
offered by the gods - the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to
a shapeless and hopeless fall.
The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the
most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains
its man. The reaping, and the binding up and stacking of the sheaves, and
the carting and building of the ricks, and the gleaning, there was
something to do for every one, from the 'olde, olde, very olde man,' the
Thomas Parr of the hamlet, down to the very youngest child whose little
eye could see, and whose little hand could hold a stalk of wheat. The
gleaners had a way of binding up the collected wheatstalks together so
that a very large quantity was held tightly in a very small compass.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 158 of 394
Words from 42566 to 42826
of 105669
