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Updated: May 15, 2025
Then Mathieu very carefully scrutinized a wash drawing of a very simple but powerful steam thresher, an invention of his own, on which he had been working for some time past, and which a big landowner of Beauce, M. Firon-Badinier, was to examine during the afternoon.
Nothing can be more lovely than this late autumn day, so still, save for the droning of the thresher and the constant tinny chuckle of the grey, thin-headed Guinea-fowl, driven by this business away from their usual haunts.
"Come on, do Auntie Lissa!" urged Jim. "It's begun; I can hear it." "So can I," said Lissa drily; for the great moaning hum of the thresher filled the air, went on and on as it would all day except at food-times, sounding like some vast wasp held captive and booming unceasingly some great dragon of a wasp, as Jimmy put it.
Two men cutters and feeders, as they were called received the sheaves tossed to them from the wagons, cut the withes of straw which bound them, and pushed them evenly into the thresher. Farmer Loper himself and one of his sons stood at the place where the grain ran out, and as fast as one bushel-measure was filled another one was set in its place and the wheat poured into a sack.
"To have the key" is an expression used by harvesters elsewhere in the sense of to cut or bind or thresh the last sheaf; hence, it is equivalent to the phrases "You have the Old Man," "You are the Old Man," which are addressed to the cutter, binder, or thresher of the last sheaf.
At Bohlingen, near Radolfzell in Baden, the last sheaf is called the Rye-sow or the Wheat-sow, according to the crop; and at Röhrenbach in Baden the person who brings the last armful for the last sheaf is called the Corn-sow or the Oats-sow. At Friedingen, in Swabia, the thresher who gives the last stroke is called Sow Barley-sow, Corn-sow, or the like, according to the crop.
In times of harvest, when a big gang is at work, the breakdown of a thresher will stop operations for a whole day, if the farmer has to drive to town behind a horse to get needed parts. With an automobile, he can dash in and out in a few hours. No one expects the automobile to replace the horse on the farm.
Looking like big bluish shadows, thresher sharks went by, eight feet long and gifted with an extremely acute sense of smell.
The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing.
"Is n't the Vic. side the best for work?" I shouted. "Yes; takin' it generally. But there's a new saw-mill startin' on this side, seven or eight mile up from here; an' I know the two fellers that owns it two brothers, the name o' H . Fact, I got my eyes cooked workin' at a thresher for them. I'm not frightened but what I'll git work at the mill. Fine, off-handed, reasonable fellers."
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