“How d’you find it, John-Willy?” asked Ishmael of the little old man, who rolled an ear of barley in his horny fingers and answered: 

“Rich, Maister Ishmael, rich!...”

So it had come to the time of the harvest at Cloom, and the crops were sound and sweet, and, if the weather held, the threshing would soon follow.  Life and harvest went on as they had for years, and Ishmael saw that all things were done as they should be, and now the House had adjourned and Nicky had come down to help him.  For this, after all, was life, Ishmael told himself—­this seeing to the earth and her fulness, this dealing with men and their wages and their work.  This was definite; about it there could be no illusion, no shattering of beliefs.

Nicky, who for all his years was still occasionally swept by the impulse to play, now when he saw Jimmy riding so triumphantly upon the leader stopped the machine as it came past, and, bidding the driver dismount, took his place upon the high iron seat and started off.  Jimmy shrieked with delight, and urged on his horse so fast that Nicky had to shout to him to keep quiet.  Jimmy kept on turning his head to see the completed bundles being emitted from the back of the binder, and at every one he gave a whoop of joy as though it were a result of his and his father’s cleverness.  Nicky cracked his whip neatly round the boy’s head without ever touching him, as he had learnt to do in Canada, and every time the little group of men and women standing beside Ishmael, his tenants, applauded, admiringly.  “They make a handsome pair, so they do!” said old John-Willy Jacka.  “I reckon you’m rare proud of your son and grandson, Maister Ishmael!”

Ishmael nodded.  His eyes were fixed on the two of them as they appeared up the slope—­Jim coming in view first, so young and glowing against the sunlit blue of the sky, so small upon the big powerful horse; then Nicky, lean and handsome, his grave face lit to mirth, looking, with his slouch felt hat and bare neck and chest exposed by the loose open shirt he wore, like some brown god of the harvest—­not a young deity of spring, but the fulfilled presentment of life at the height of attainment, at harvest.

Yet he had been as young as Jim, would be as old as himself—­so thought Ishmael, with that impotency the watching of the flight of time evokes in the heart.  To Ishmael it seemed such a mere flash as he looked back to the evening when the Neck had been cried in that field, and he had thought the moment so vivid it must last for ever.  That moment seemed hardly further ago than when he had first broken his own earth in this field with his new iron plough.  Neither seemed really long ago at all—­time had gone too swiftly for that—­yet both seemed very far away, not set there by period, but by being in another life.  What seemed furthest away of anything was the morning last spring when he had sown these acres with the dredge-corn now being reaped, and when the figure of an old man in slaty-grey clothes had paused by the gate and stared across the farmyard....  Archelaus now lay in six feet of earth, while he himself still walked free upon these broad acres; and yet—­what was it Archelaus had said?  “It’ll be I, and not you, who’s living on at Cloom; ’tes my flesh and blood’ll be there, so ’tes mine, after all....”