towards the centre, away from chance of rain.  At last it was all finished—­all the precious grain tucked away out of possible harm in the heart of the arishmows, save for the feathery bunch at the crest that fastened all off with a flourish.  It had been a lovely task, the building of the arishmows, for, like all work to do with the land, it was the perfection of rhythm, and this, added to the unending flow of tossing and packing, held always that lovely rustling of stalk and ear as an accompaniment of music to the action.

Not many days later and the stately arishmows were destroyed and the sheaves brought in on waggons and built into great stacks in the field which lay next to the farmyard, where the threshing would take place.  There was a pile of the dredge-corn, another of deeply-golden oats, a third of the greyer-tinted wheat, which was a little smaller than the other two, though that also was as high as the roof of the barn.

In the cleared space between the stacks the great steam thresher would be brought; but now the men who would help in that work were still all part of the weaving pattern of stacking; one man tossed from the high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw.  Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery.  And again —­so often before, but never so keenly as now—­was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all....  This could not surely be the only thing that moved so rhythmically towards harvest; this inevitable flow, this deeply necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men’s lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust?

CHAPTER VI

THRESHING

That day had come to which the whole of the farming year leads up—­the day of the threshing, when the grain is at last released from danger and made ready to be stored in barns, to be ground in mills.  “Guldise,” as it is still called in West Cornwall, is an epic occasion, when all the months, from the first breaking of the land to the piling of the reaped sheaves, culminate at the apex of achievement.

In the field, between the waiting stacks, was the thresher; the traction-engine which had dragged it there stood beyond, only harnessed to it now by the long driving-belt that would, when the time came, make of the thresher a living creature.  Presently all the men began to arrive, not only the labourers who always worked on the Manor farm, but the men from the neighbouring farms, from those owned by Ishmael