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That lake itself, whose diameter has been estimated at 800 feet, was rose-red and self-illuminated, and the increased noise was owing to the increased force of the fire-fountain, which was playing regularly at a height of 300 feet, with the cross fountains, like wheat-sheaves, at its lower part.
A tall ladder stood against the Mazet, and the children were engaged in hanging tiny wheat-sheaves along the eaves: the Christmas portion of the birds. In old times, the Vidame explained, it was the general custom for children to make this pretty offering that the birds of heaven, finding themselves so served, might descend in clouds to the feast prepared for them by Christian bounty.
The harvest-hands ran wildly around, shouting and calling, evidently unable to do anything. The line of wagons full of wheat-sheaves broke up; men dragged at the plunging horses. Then flame followed the smoke out of the thresher. "I've heard of threshers catchin' fire," said Anderson, as if dumfounded, "but I never seen one.... Now how on earth did that happen?"
Ere Richard reached the yard, he saw, over the top of the wall, the first load of wheat-sheaves from the harvest-field, standing at the door of the barn, and high-uplifted thereon the figure of Faithful Stopchase, one of the men, a well-known frequenter of puritan assemblies all the country round, who was holding forth, and that with much freedom, in tones that sounded very like vituperation, if not malediction, against some one invisible.
Squads of diminutive donkeys are seen picking their weary way through the bowlders, toiling from the isolated fields to the village threshing-floors beneath small mountains of wheat-sheaves. Sometimes the donkeys themselves are invisible below the general level of the bowlders, and nothing is to be seen but the head and shoulders of a man, persuading before him several animated heaps of straw.
Ere Richard reached the yard, he saw, over the top of the wall, the first load of wheat-sheaves from the harvest-field, standing at the door of the barn, and high-uplifted thereon the figure of Faithful Stopchase, one of the men, a well-known frequenter of puritan assemblies all the country round, who was holding forth, and that with much freedom, in tones that sounded very like vituperation, if not malediction, against some one invisible.
The wheat-sheaves had been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September afternoon.
There appeared wheat-sheaves, mushrooms, stags' horns, cabbage-leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with brilliant tints, of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equalling in beauty and surpassing in grandeur the most favourite flower-bed of the curious florist.
Stitched on the banner in colored cloth were the two wheat-sheaves and two ships of the Montdidiers, and a scroll stretched its length across the bottom, with the motto doubtless, although in the wind one could not read it. "The women. Good of 'em, what? Miss Vanderman drew it on paper. They cut it out, and sat up last night sewing it."
Some years ago, when straw bonnets were all the rage, the following pithy lines were composed by M. P. Andrewes, Esq.: "Some ladies' heads appear like stubble fields; Who now of threaten'd famine dare complain, When every female forehead teems with grain? See how the wheat-sheaves nod amid the plumes!
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