Unloading the wheat is the hardest part of the bargeman's work. His fork must be full and he must be fast. Otherwise his partner, who takes turns driving and filling, and who helps to pitch the wheat out, will have more than half the pitching to do. And all the time will be used up. Neither man will have a rest-period while waiting for the other barge to come up. This rest-period is the thing toward which we all wrestle. If we save it out we drink from the water-jugs in the corner of the wagon. We examine where the grasshoppers have actually bitten little nicks out of our pitchfork handles, nicks that are apt to make blisters. We tell our adventures and, when the header breaks down, and must be tinkered endlessly, and we have a grand rest, the stacker sings a list of the most amazing cowboy songs. He is a young man, yet rode the range here for seven years before it became wheat-country. One day when the songs had become hopelessly, prosaically pornographic I yearned for a change. I quoted the first stanza of Atalanta's chorus: "When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, The mother of months, in meadow or plain, Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain----" The stacker asked for more. I finished the chorus. Then I repeated it several times, while the header was being mended. We had to get to work. The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride to the field he began: "'When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, The mother of months, in meadow or plain, Fills the shadows----' "Dammit, what's the rest of it? I've been trying to recite that piece all night." Now he has the first four stanzas. And last evening he left for Dodge City to stay overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to purchase _Atalanta in Calydon_ and find in the Public Library _The Lady of Shallot_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, besides paying the usual visit to his wife and children. Working in a header-barge is fun, more fun than shocking wheat, even when one is working for a Mennonite boss. The crew is larger. There is occasional leisure to be social. There is more cool wind, for one is higher in the air. There is variety in the work. One drives about a third of the time, guides the wheat into the header a third of the time and empties the barge a third of the time. The emptying was the back-breaking work. And I was all the while fearful, lest, from plain awkwardness, or shaking from weariness, I should stick some man in the eye with my pitchfork. But I did not. I came nearer to being a real harvester every day. The last two days my hands were so hard I could work without gloves, this despite the way the grasshoppers had chewed the fork-handle. Believe everything you have ever heard of the Kansas grasshoppers.