The day shone with the clear pearliness of early June:  high in air the big cumulus clouds rode golden-white, trailing their shadows over the dappled land beneath; the branches of hawthorn gleamed silvery amidst the pearly blossom; a wine-pale sunlight washed with iridescence sky and earth.  In the great sloping field, which held six days’ hard ploughing between its stone ramparts, the granite monolith stood four-square to all the winds that blew, defying ploughs and weathers.  The two brown horses waited by the highest hedge, the plough, that always looks so toy-like and is so stubborn, quiescent behind them, a boy ready at their heads, switch in hand.  With a freshness of emotion never quite to be recaptured, Ishmael gathered up the rope reins and took the handles of the plough in his grip.  The impact of the blade against the soil when the straining horses had given the first jerk up the slope was as some keen exquisite mating of his innermost being with the substance of the earth ... a joy almost sensual, so strong was the pleasure of the actual physical contact as yielding soil and fine hard edge met—­his hands sensitively aware of the texture of that meeting through the iron frame of the plough.  Up and down the field, over its humped back, widening the strip of brown between him and the hedge, always with pleasure at sight of that long rich fold of earth turning over perpetually under the sideways impact of the blade, turning over till the green turf was hidden by the brown of the under soil....

The field was not an easy one for the horses by reason of its curve; the off horse, on the vore, as the part already ploughed is called, dug his great hoofs firmly in the stiff soil, but the near horse slipped perpetually on the short turf.  Every now and then the plough had to be stopped while great hunks of granite were hacked out of the earth; then, with loud cries of encouragement and a cut of the whip, the horses were urged on again, the flash of their shoes gleaming rhythmically up and down, up and down, as Ishmael guided the plough behind them.  His hands gripped the handles, the plough clanked, the horses struggled, and the sound of their hoofs made a dull thud-thud upon the earth; the wind blew gratefully on his moist brow and on the flanks of the animals; at every turn the shouts of his voice as he stopped the horses and reversed the clanking plough went up through the quiet world.

The gulls sat, dazzlingly white, motionless as little headstones, along the rim where green land met brown vore, then rose and shrieked and swooped as the clatter began again, dipping in the wake of the new furrow.  And the sun went overhead, making sweating steeds and sweating man and bright wheels and brighter blade of the plough glisten like sculptured bronze, while all the time the green was being more and more swamped, furrow after furrow, by the encroaching brown.