Country Life
By IAN NIALL WHEN I passed W.'s farm yesterday it was already dark. A light showed from the shippon and there was a gleam behind the curtains of the house. It all looked very snug. This morning the scene was different. A threshing machine was revealed at the side of the Dutch barn. It was snowing lightly. The air was full of flying chaff and flurries of snowflakes. In the shelter of the barn that was packed tight with sheaves the machine clattered away. A litter of highly coloured kittens peeped down nervously from the cliff of stacked sheaves, big-eyed and ready to scuttle at the slightest alarm, but in spite of the kittens, it was an altogether bleak scene, lacking the impressiveness that a steam engine with a tall smoking chimney stack would have given it. Instead there was a fume of oil and a drone that dominated the countryside. W. caught' sight of me through the snow and chaff and came to greet me. He shouted, but I could not hear him, and we grinned at each other for a minute or two before he hurried back to take a sack from its hooks. I went off, leaving the mill to its servers, who were completely absorbed in their work and isolated from the rest of the world by a sort of barrier of sound.
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