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Trees, and hayricks, broken boats, and humble pieces of cottage furniture, jostled each other between the piers, tossing and dancing in grotesque gaiety, like drunken holiday-makers on their way to the sea. The great river that is credited with exacting six lives each year, was claiming its toll.
The farmhouses, hayricks, and an occasional village, drifted past now to the right, now to the left, and occasionally they overhauled a leisurely belated cyclist, who at once began to take an unimportant position in the rear, his lamp growing less and less down the stretch of long white road.
We will drive on to the farm and come back to the house later." Everything indicated thrift and prosperity. There was a great barn and stables, a capacious warehouse, out-buildings of all sorts, corn houses, hayricks, and a building for wheat, while nearby was a shed full of modern agricultural machinery.
This should be put down with a firm hand. By the roadside here the hay tyers, who cut up the hayricks into trusses, use balances a trifling matter, but sufficient to mark a difference, for in the west such men use a steelyard slung on a prong, the handle of the prong on the shoulder and the points stuck in the rick, with which to weigh the trusses.
Two cowhouses, a cluster of hayricks, and a broad stretch of fields, yellow with the ripening wheat, formed a fitting setting to the dwelling of a prosperous farmer. The green slopes were dotted every here and there with dark clumps of gorse bushes, all alight with the flaming yellow blossoms.
Sun enough to cure the hay and ripen the grain, they had; and July was sweet with the perfume of hayfield, and lovely with brown hayricks, and musical with the whetting of scythes. Mrs. Starling's little farm had a good deal of grass land; and the haying was proportionally a busy season.
What can even the quiet inhabitant of the English lowlands, whose scene for the manifestation of the fire of heaven is limited to the tops of hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the old elm trees, know of the mighty passages of splendour which are tossed from Alp to Alp over the azure of a thousand miles of champaign?
The only regular inhabitant of this dreary scene was, as I have before said, the old labourer, Daniel Thorpe, who slept in one corner of the house, partly to prevent its total dilapidation, and to preserve the valuable hayricks and the tumble-down farm buildings from the pillage to which unprotected property is necessarily exposed, and partly to keep in repair the long line of boundary fence, to clean the graffages, clear out the moat-like ditches, and see that the hollow-sounding wooden bridges which formed the sole communication by which the hay wagons could pass to and from the distant meadows, were in proper order to sustain their ponderous annual load.
At last the sky cleared and the moon shone out upon such a waste of waters as Noah might have beheld from the ark. Only there were things floating in them that Noah would scarcely have seen; hayricks, dead and drowning cattle, household furniture, and once even a coffin washed from some graveyard, while beyond stretched the dreary outline of the sand dunes.
He is a bit nasty at the start of the season; and ever since he killed Wallis, the second groom, last year, none of us care much to ride him. But you can manage him, no doubt. He'll just carry your weight." Mr. Travers dreamed that night of taking large, desperate leaps into space on a wild horse that snorted forth flames, and that rose at solid stone walls as though they were hayricks.
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