When the time came for the corn to be thrashed, the sheaves were placed on the barn floor with their heads all in the same direction, the binders which held them together loosened, and the corn spread out.  Two men were generally employed in this occupation, one standing opposite the other, and the corn was separated from the straw and chaff by knocking the heads with sticks.  These sticks, or flails, were divided into two parts, the longer of which was about the size of a broom-handle, but made of a much stronger kind of wood, while the other, which was about half its length, was fastened to the top by a hinge made of strong leather, so that the flail was formed into the shape of a whip, except that the lash would not bend, and was as thick as the handle.  The staff was held with both hands, one to guide and the other to strike, and as the thrashers were both practically aiming at the same place, it was necessary, in order to prevent their flails colliding, that one lash should be up in the air at the same moment that the other was down on the floor, so that it required some practice in order to become a proficient thrasher.  The flails descended on the barn floors with the regularity of the ticking of a clock, or the rhythmic and measured footsteps of a man walking in a pair of clogs at a quickstep speed over the hard surface of a cobbled road.  We knew that this mediaeval method of thrashing corn would be doomed in the future, and that the old-fashioned flail would become a thing of the past, only to be found in some museum as a relic of antiquity, so we recorded this description of Chantrey’s contest with the happy memories of the days when we ourselves went a-thrashing corn a long time ago!

[Illustration:  GENERAL VIEW OF BRIMHAM ROCKS.]

What Chantrey thought of those marvellous rocks at Brimham was not recorded, but, as they covered quite fifty acres of land, his friend, like ourselves, would find it impossible to give any lengthy description of them, and might, like the auctioneers, dismiss them with the well-known phrase, “too numerous to mention.”

To our great advantage we were the only visitors at the rocks, and for that reason enjoyed the uninterrupted services of the official guide, an elderly man whose heart was in his work, and a born poet withal.

[Illustration:  THE DANCING-BEAR ROCK.]

The first thing we had to do was to purchase his book of poems, which, as a matter of course, was full of poetical descriptions of the wonderful rocks he had to show us—­and thoroughly and conscientiously he did his duty.  As we came to each rock, whether we had to stand below or above it, he poured out his poetry with a rapidity that quite bewildered and astonished us.  He could not, of course, tell us whether the rocks had been worn into their strange forms by the action of the sea washing against them at some remote period, or whether they had been shaped in the course of ages by the action of the wind and rain;