So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair.  Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall.  The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service.  The manner is this.  You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts.  A good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than into his lifting.  Again, stand up to your work.  The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force the scythe through the grass.  The good mower, serene and able, stands as nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward.  Then also let every stroke get well away.  Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon.  Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive mood:  be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound.  In this mowing should be like one’s prayers—­all of a sort and always the same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them, as it were, with half your mind:  that happier half, the half that does not bother.

In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until the air was full of odours.  At the end of every lane I sharpened my scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down again upon my shoulder to begin another.  So, long before the bell rang in the chapel above me—­that is, long before six o’clock, which is the time for the Angelus—­I had many swathes already lying in order parallel like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great contrast with the shaven part, looked dense and high.  As it says in the Ballad of Val-es-Dunes, where—­

     The tall son of the Seven Winds
     Came riding out of Hither-hythe,

and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)

       ... was like a scythe
     In Arcus when the grass is high
     And all the swathes in order lie,
     And there’s the bailiff standing by
       A-gathering of the tithe.

So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen.

I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in older times, before I had left the Valley.