CQUNTRY LIFE
NEVER have I seen the country suffer so greatly from lack of the scythe. The machines that now do the harvesting are marvellous works of art. They make harvest a quick festival and a iess laborious, but there are things they cannot do in a landblessedly parcelled out by hedgerows: they cannot cut the first swathe without crushing good grain. They demand a circumference cleared by a scythe. This work has been in a large measure dispensed with as slow and costly, even if a good mower was to be had. The result is that round every other field a breadth of good grain lies prostrate, flattened by the wheel which played the juggernaut and benefactor by the same movement. As this flattened corn is not cut it cannot be raked up, but lies there to "rot or spill and form a nuisance to the next crop. The machine is producing in England as on American prairies a contempt for such petty waste ; and in this even the poorer folk share. They will no longer trouble to glean. Yet I knr one field at the very edge of a village where enough good, particularly good, wheat lies to give several families bread for a twelvemonth and feed the back- yard poultry to boot. Perhaps mechanisation has not gone far enough! There are excellent hand motor-propelled mowers which carry the cutting knives in front. One proved most efficient, for example, in cutting the hay round the apple trees in my orchard.
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