and from others, for every threshing is a festival with a great dinner and refreshments in the field and good cheer, even for the crowds of children and stray dogs that always turn up out of nowhere.  In the kitchen the maids were busy with the preparations for the dinner, and in the breakfast-room even Lissa, always late, was hurrying through her breakfast so as to go out and start work on the series of quick sketches she meant to do of the thresher at work and the groups around it.

Lissa was a young-looking woman for her thirty-five years, no more pretty than she had ever been, but graceful, and with a strong charm in her lazy voice and long grey eyes and in the mouth that was so like Georgie’s, only less regular.  Her chin and jaw had the clear sharpness of Ishmael’s; she was far more like him both in character and aspect than the sweet round Ruth, and Ishmael had grown to feel more and more that no matter how long a time elapsed between the occasions when he and Lissa saw each other, yet they could always pick up where they had left off, that there was never need for more than half-sentences between them.  She, who was supposed to be the selfish one of the family because she lived in London most of the year and seldom wrote—­she was still the only member of the household who had known something was wrong with Ishmael.  She had found him uncommunicative on the subject, but she watched him with her clear understanding eyes that always made him think her so restful.

“Come on, do Auntie Lissa!” urged Jim.  “It’s begun; I can hear it.”

“So can I,” said Lissa drily; for the great moaning hum of the thresher filled the air, went on and on as it would all day except at food-times, sounding like some vast wasp held captive and booming unceasingly—­some great dragon of a wasp, as Jimmy put it.

They went out together, but Lissa insisted on going to find grandpa first and helping him on with his light coat; then they all three went out across the farmyard and through the open gate into the field.

The thresher stood humming and palpitant, its great bulk painted a dull pinkish colour like a locust, but faded and stained with rust.  Upon its trembling roof the piles of oats, thrown by the men on the stack alongside, showed a pure golden; above the sky was dazzlingly blue, and in it the white cumuli rode brilliantly.  The men working on the top of the thresher showed bronzed against the luminous blue, their shirts as brightly white as the clouds, the shadows under their slouched hats lying soft and blue across their clear eyes.

Poised on the stacks the men were busy feeding the sheaves to the men on the thresher, who in their turn tilted them into the great concave drum in its hidden heart.  From one end poured out steady streams of golden grain, into the hanging sacks that boys took away as they filled, bringing in their place empty sacks that hung limply for a minute and then began to fill, swelling and puffing out to sudden solidity.  The sieves beneath the thresher shook back and forth, back and forth, tirelessly, while chaff poured away from the open jaws at the side in a fine dusty column of pale gold, from which the topmost husks blew up into the air, so that it was always filled with a whirling cloud that danced and gleamed in the sunlight like a swarm of golden bees.