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Each of them sets himself to reap a patch of corn as fast as he can; he who cuts the last handful or the last stalk is greeted by the rest with an exulting cry, "You have the Old Man." Sometimes a black mask is fastened on the reaper's face and he is dressed in woman's clothes; or if the reaper is a woman, she is dressed in man's clothes. A dance follows.
In the latter assertion he was somewhat premature, for the French crew, now rallying amidships, made a desperate attack on the forecastle, but the boatswain's flashing weapon literally cut them down like corn before the reaper's scythe, as they came on. Still they pressed round us. Most of our men were occupied in making sail.
"It may not be our lot to wield The sickle in the ripened field; Nor ours to hear on summer eves, The reaper's song among the sheaves; Yet, when our duty's task is wrought, In unison with God's great thought, The near and future blend in one, And whatsoe'er is willed is done." I have come to entertain very serious doubts about my "orthodoxy" on the subject of doing good.
When the reaper's task was ended, and the summer wearing late, Parson Avery sailed from Newbury with his wife and children eight, Dropping down the river harbor in the shallop Watch and Wait. Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer-morn, And the newly-planted orchards dropping their fruits first-born, And the homesteads like brown islands amidst a sea of corn.
After taking Pozières and driving over the ridge and on down into the Courcelette Valley, we took up a position about 500 yards from the German front lines. Here occurred another of those remarkable escapes from the Grim Reaper's toll that won for me throughout the unit the pseudonym, "Horseshoe Grant."
How many children, from that day to this have loved those little pieces, the "Happy Farmer," "Wild Rider," "First Loss," "Reaper's Song," and all the rest. Even the great pianists of our time are not above performing these little classics in public. They are a gift, unique in musical literature, often imitated, but never equaled by other writers.
And may not sweet Grace Acton her now repentant father the kindly Jonathan his generous master, and if there be any other of the Hurstley folk we love, may they not all meet destruction at his hands, as a handful of corn before the reaper's sickle? I say not that they shall, but that they might.
This, remember, is not a fancy sketch of rural poetry; this is the reaper's real existence. He had been in the harvest-field fourteen hours, exposed to the intense heat, not even shielded by a pith helmet; he had worked the day through with thew and sinew; he had had for food a little dry bread and a few onions, for drink a little weak tea and a great deal of small beer.
And indeed often have I seen how that, when one of a pair, who have dwelt together so many years in true union of hearts, departs this life, this earth is too lonely for the other, so that one might deem that their hearts had grown to be as it were one flesh, and the one that is left hath bled to death inwardly from the Reaper's stroke.
And all the time as it slowly advanced, it breathed and belched forth tongues of flame; its nostrils seemed to breathe death and destruction, and the Huns, terrified by its appearance, were mown down like corn falling to the reaper's sickle. Presently it stopped. The humming ceased. The spell was broken. We looked at one another, and then we laughed. How we laughed!
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