In the cleared space between the stacks the great steam thresher would be brought; but now the men who would help in that work were still all part of the weaving pattern of stacking; one man tossed from the high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again --so often before, but never so keenly as now--was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only thing that moved so rhythmically towards harvest; this inevitable flow, this deeply necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and threshing, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust? CHAPTER VI THRESHING That day had come to which the whole of the farming year leads up--the day of the threshing, when the grain is at last released from danger and made ready to be stored in barns, to be ground in mills. "Guldise," as it is still called in West Cornwall, is an epic occasion, when all the months, from the first breaking of the land to the piling of the reaped sheaves, culminate at the apex of achievement. In the field, between the waiting stacks, was the thresher; the traction-engine which had dragged it there stood beyond, only harnessed to it now by the long driving-belt that would, when the time came, make of the thresher a living creature. Presently all the men began to arrive, not only the labourers who always worked on the Manor farm, but the men from the neighbouring farms, from those owned by Ishmael and from others, for every threshing is a festival with a great dinner and refreshments in the field and good cheer, even for the crowds of children and stray dogs that always turn up out of nowhere. In the kitchen the maids were busy with the preparations for the dinner, and in the breakfast-room even Lissa, always late, was hurrying through her breakfast so as to go out and start work on the series of quick sketches she meant to do of the thresher at work and the groups around it.