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It looked more as if she were sowing to imperceptible furrows. Nan's eyes were very long-sighted, but this thing puzzled her altogether. She now certainly looked like a farmer's man scattering seed-corn. Singing Sal saw and recognised her young-lady friend at some distance, and seemed to moderate her gestures, though these did not quite cease. When she came up, Nan said to her,
It was like that when Alexandra tested her seed-corn in the spring, he mused. From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.
A landed proprietor who might hire farmers to cultivate his fields inflicted severe fines for acts of dishonesty with regard to the cattle, provender, or seed-corn committed to their charge. If a man stole the provender for the cattle he had to make it good, and he was also liable to the punishment of having his hands cut off.
For thirty years the husbandman never sowed with any confidence that he should reap; the seed-corn was no doubt often consumed by the reckless troopers or the starving peasantry; and if foreign countries had been able to supply food there were no railroads to bring it.
Alfred, he started to run away one night awhile back, after Pitman had whipped him for planting the wrong seed-corn. I happened to meet him down the road. He had a little bundle under one arm and a pet chicken I had given him under the other. I stopped him and got him to go back. I couldn't bear the thought of having him so far away from me and unprotected.
In his heart he and his friends were incredulous that the chiefs of Okoyong would listen to a woman. A third time the patient Mary went to him, and succeeded in bringing him and his son back with her, the women remaining behind until a new house could be built. The home-coming was fall of pathos. House, farm, clothing, seed-corn, yams, goats, fowls, all had vanished.
Fragments were scattered for luck on the fields with the seed-corn. A myth explained that a flock of pigs were swallowed by Earth when Persephone was ravished by Hades to the lower world, of which matter the Hymn says nothing. We may be inclined to doubt, however, whether the task before the genius of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so colossal.
Often it is kept till the sowing-time in spring, when part of it is mixed with the seed-corn and part given to the ploughman and plough-horses or ploughoxen to eat, in the expectation of a good harvest.
Just as at the Thesmophoria an autumn festival in honour of the corn-goddess swine's flesh was partly eaten, partly kept in caverns till the following year, when it was taken up to be sown with the seed-corn in the fields for the purpose of securing a good crop; so in the neighbourhood of Grenoble the goat killed on the harvest-field is partly eaten at the harvest-supper, partly pickled and kept till the next harvest; so at Pouilly the ox killed on the harvest-field is partly eaten by the harvesters, partly pickled and kept till the first day of sowing in spring, probably to be then mixed with the seed, or eaten by the ploughmen, or both; so at Udvarhely the feathers of the cock which is killed in the last sheaf at harvest are kept till spring, and then sown with the seed on the field; so in Hesse and Meiningen the flesh of pigs is eaten on Ash Wednesday or Candlemas, and the bones are kept till sowing-time, when they are put into the field sown or mixed with the seed in the bag; so, lastly, the corn from the last sheaf is kept till Christmas, made into the Yule Boar, and afterwards broken and mixed with the seed-corn at sowing in spring.
But there is a lesson in the fact for all ages even those in which miracles have ceased. Christ gives before He commands, and sends no man into the field without filling his basket with seed-corn.
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