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A single stroke of the iron flail, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds; a single sweep of the disciplined scythe, and countless acres were in an instant mown. Nevertheless, although beaten constantly, the Netherlanders were not conquered.
Flail was in, at hearing the melancholy story of her sufferings; nor is it possible to tell with what generosity and kindness she strove to comfort her, telling her to compose herself, for she should no longer be in want of any thing. "I have, thank Heaven," said she, "a most worthy good man for my husband, who will rejoice with me in having it in his power to relieve a suffering fellow-creature.
When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail. But machinery has also increased the size of the farm.
"A'll come for ye, Tammas, gin there be danger; but what are ye feared for wi' the Queen's ain surgeon here?" Fifty minutes did the flail rise and fall, save twice, when Tammas crept to the door and listened, the dog lifting his head and whining.
The Germans, in spite of monstrous losses under the flail of the soixante-quinzes, were forcing their way from slope to slope, capturing positions which all but dominated the whole of the Verdun heights. "If the French break we shall lose the war," said the pessimist. "The French will never lose Verdun," said the optimist. "Why not?
I passed a little field of buckwheat that had been cut some days and had fully ripened. A woman was threshing out the grain with a flail upon a spread canvas, surrounded by a circle of purple-tinted cones, the sheaves leaning together. Now the wide level moor returned, but Nature was not quite the same here as she had been before. The vast expanse was dotted over with dark little juniper bushes.
Her punishment for sin might be that those other more dearly loved ones were not to be among the saved, but this child she could shake in the face of the Almighty.... It was by this new passion that Ishmael, with his foolish little plans of a new importance, found himself caught up and held relentlessly. The revivalist preacher had come, and was indeed sweeping the land like a flail.
They pressed around him in a ring; and at first they were sad, since of what he sang they remembered the like in Lyonnesse plough and sickle and flail, nesting birds and harvest, flakes of ore in the river-beds, dinner in the shade, and the plain beyond winking in the noon-day heat.
The great barn filled with grain had to be threshed, for the cattle needed the straw, and the grain had to be got out for the market. So day after day he and his men hammered away with the flail, or spread the sheaves on the barn floor to be trampled out by horses. Threshing machines were unknown then, as were all the labour-saving machines now so extensively used by the farmer.
Peter's Day, he plied his scythe with a furious energy that might have mown a young birch copse up by the roots, or swiftly and untiringly wielded a flail over two yards long; while the hard oblong muscles of his shoulders rose and fell like a lever. His perpetual silence lent a solemn dignity to his unwearying labor.
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