Yesterday I stopped to watch two men sowing a field
with oats. They were doing it in the old-fashioned way, as my grandfather used to do it—by hand from buckets. It looks so simple, this hand-sowing of seed, but it is an art. There can be few men who still know the way of hand-sowing, the taking of corn in the palm and scattering it evenly at the swing of the arm. Anyone can throw corn about, but the way it is scattered shows before summer is old. An expert can sow oats so that they are neither too thick nor too thin and are never patchy. The two men who were hand-sowing walked in step and moved quickly. They looked like marionettes some- how, even when they halted to refill their buckets at sacks placed along the furrows. I admired the way they strode on without loss of time. Their boots made a little cloud of dust at every step. At the top corner of the field, where they had already scattered the grain, a company of pigeons was feeding in- dustriously. I wondered if the sowers knew, but they were far too busy for me to inter- rupt them and the pigeons went on filling their crops with impunity.
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