Do You Think Such Blood
Would Have Been Shed For Barren Wastes?
No, it was to possess these
harvest-laden fields.
The wheat-fields are the battle-fields of the
world. If not so openly invaded as of old time, the struggle between
nations is still one for the ownership or for the control of corn. When
Italy became a vineyard and could no more feed the armies, slowly power
slipped away and the great empire of Rome split into many pieces. It has
long been foreseen that if ever England is occupied with a great war the
question of our corn supply, so largely derived from abroad, will become
a weighty matter. Happy for us that we have wheat-growing colonies! As
persons, each of us, in our voluntary or involuntary struggle for money,
is really striving for those little grains of wheat that lie so lightly
in the palm of the hand. Corn is coin and coin is corn, and whether it be
a labourer in the field, who no sooner receives his weekly wage than he
exchanges it for bread, or whether it be the financier in Lombard Street
who loans millions, the object is really the same - wheat. All ends in the
same: iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the
desk - no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton - the object is really
sacks of wheat. Therefore to the eye of the mind they are not sacks of
wheat, but filled to the brim, like those in the magic caves of the
'Arabian Nights,' with gold.
JUST BEFORE WINTER.
A rich tint of russet deepened on the forest top, and seemed to sink day
by day deeper into the foliage like a stain; riper and riper it grew, as
an apple colours. Broad acres these of the last crop, the crop of leaves;
a thousand thousand quarters, the broad earth will be their barn. A warm
red lies on the hill-side above the woods, as if the red dawn stayed
there through the day; it is the heath and heather seeds; and higher
still, a pale yellow fills the larches. The whole of the great hill glows
with colour under the short hours of the October sun; and overhead, where
the pine-cones hang, the sky is of the deepest azure. The conflagration
of the woods burning luminously crowds into those short hours a
brilliance the slow summer does not know.
The frosts and mists and battering rains that follow in quick succession
after the equinox, the chill winds that creep about the fields, have
ceased a little while, and there is a pleasant sound in the fir trees.
Everything is not gone yet. In the lanes that lead down to the 'shaws' in
the dells, the 'gills,' as these wooded depths are called, buckler ferns,
green, fresh, and elegantly fashioned, remain under the shelter of the
hazel-lined banks. From the tops of the ash wands, where the linnets so
lately sang, coming up from the stubble, the darkened leaves have been
blown, and their much-divided branches stand bare like outstretched
fingers.
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