“Do you mean to tell me, then,” she said, after a busy painful pause, “that Shelley probably misunderstood that lark he wrote a poem about?  He called it a blithe spirit, you know, because it sang.  Do you suppose it wasn’t one?”

“Certainly not,” said the fairy.  “I don’t know the actual facts of the case, but without a doubt your friend Shelley was standing on the unfortunate bird’s nest all the time he was writing his poem.”

Sarah Brown, with a deep sigh, began hoeing again.

Fifty beans yet.

She had altogether ceased to find pleasure in the day.  Pain is an extinguisher that can put out the sun.  She had ceased to find pleasure in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl.  She was irritated by the fact that the cuckoo had only one song to sing.  She tried not to hoe in time to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her.  Her row of beans stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked along it the end seemed farther away.  Every time she raised her hoe the sword of pain slipped under her guard.

The Dog David, impatient of her unnatural taste in occupations, had forsaken her.  She could trace his course by a moving ripple across the potato patch, just as a shark’s movement seams the sea.

Forty beans.

Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors.  Under the sun time stands almost still.  Only when every minute is a physical effort do you discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one hour is very little nearer to the evening than another.  People who work indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face.  Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over.  We of Out of Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn before a blackbird’s song is over.  We know the length of days.  And after many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.

Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.

“I can’t hoe any more,” she said.  “There are twenty-five more beans, but I can’t hoe them.”

“Why should you?” asked the nearest fairy indifferently.  “The foreman never notices if we shirk.  We always do.”

“I said I would hoe this row,” said Sarah Brown.  “But I am accursed.  It is a good thing at least to know one’s limitations.”

Even in affliction she was prosy.

“I would advise you to go and have your dinner,” another fairy said.  “Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now.  But I left a little lemonade in your bottle.  Go under the trees and drink it.”