In the present day, when machinery has almost obliterated agriculture, the cultivation of the soil is losing more and more the noble aspect of that sacred art and of its idyllic character. Now at harvest time the plains are covered with a kind of monster spider and gigantic crab, which scratch up the ground with their claws, and cut down the grain with cutlasses, and bind the sheaves with wire; then follow other monsters snorting steam, a sort of Tarascon dragon who seizes on the fallen wheat, cuts the straw, sifts the grain, and shakes out the ears of corn. All this is done in latest American style, a dull matter of business, with never a song to make toil a gladness, amid a whirl of noise, dust, and hideous smoke, and the constant dread, if you are not constantly on the watch, that the monster will snap off one of your limbs. This is Progress, the fatal Reaper, against whom it is useless to contend, bitter result of science, that tree of knowledge whose fruit is both good and evil. But at the time of which I write, the old methods were still in use, with all the picturesque apparatus of classic times. So soon as the corn took on a shade of apricot, throughout the Commune of Arles, a messenger went the round of the mountain villages blowing his horn and crying: “This is to give notice that the corn in Arles is ripening.” Thereupon the mountaineers, in groups of threes and fours, with their wives and daughters, their donkeys and mules, made ready to descend to the plains for harvesting. A couple of harvesters, together with a boy or young girl to stack the sheaves, made up a _solque_, and the men hired themselves out in gangs of so many _solques_, who undertook the field by contract. At the head of the group walked the chief, making a pathway through the corn, while another, called the bailiff, organised and directed the work. As in the days of Cincinnatus, Cato and Virgil, we reaped with the sickle, the fingers of the right hand protected by a shield of twisted reeds or rushes. At Arles, about the time of Saint John’s Day, thousands of these harvest labourers might be seen assembled in the Place des Hommes, their scythes slung on their backs, standing and lying about while waiting to be hired. In the mountain districts a man who had never done his harvesting in the plains of Arles found it hard, so they said, to get any girl to marry him, and it was on this custom Félix Gras founded the story of his epic poem “Les Charbonniers.” On our own farm we hired from seven to eight of these groups every year at harvest-time. It was a fine upset throughout the house when these folk arrived. All sorts of special utensils were unearthed for the occasion, barrels made of willow wood, enormous earthenware pans, big pots and jugs for wine, a whole battery of the rough pottery made at Apt. It was a time of constant feasting and gaiety, above all when we lit the bonfires on Saint John’s Day and danced round them singing the harvest songs.