Night-Time Harvesting
At nine o'clock, after the sun had set and before a very red moon had risen, the farmer was still driving his tractor round the great square of his clover field. It was too dark to see what was happening at any distance, but the busy rattle of tractor and cutter carried far through the misty air, as true a sign of beneficent activity as the hum of bees and much less dependent on favourable conditions. It will not be long before the ploughs are as busy, and after the ploughs the drills. The field has already yielded one crop of clover, and the second promises to be the better. It has dispensed a delicious smell for the last few weeks, and the carpet of purple and green will be missed by neighbours ; but it is odds that the field will be green again before Christmas. We have a capricious climate, but our farmers have discovered its advantages and exploit them well wherever the soil is good. It is on the bad soils, very rarely on the good soils, that English farming is careless and, so to say, unpatriotic. This clover field within the last few years has yielded a really immense sum of food as of fodder, in the shape of wheat, potatoes, oats and clover, and the fertility of the soil has grown rather than diminished ; the land is "in good heart" —a curiously poetic phrase to be common in the farmer's mouth.
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