The farmer is fortunate who is able to get the water completely out of his paddies by the time harvest arrives, but, as we have seen, two-thirds of the paddies must be harvested in sludge. Many crops are muddied before they can be cut. Sometimes on the eve of harvest the farmer wades in and tries, by arranging the fallen stems across one another, to keep some of the ears out of the water. But he is not very successful. Rice may lie in the wet a week or even the best end of a fortnight without serious damage. But all that this means is that within the period specified it may not sprout. It must be damaged to some extent even by a few days' immersion. The reason why it is not damaged more than it is is no doubt, first, because rice is a plant which has been brought up to take its chances with water, and in the second place because the thing which is known to the housewife as rice is not really the grain at all but the interior of the grain. Western farmers are hard put to it when their grain crops are beaten down by wind and rain; Japanese agriculturists, because they gather their harvest with a short sickle, do not find a laid crop difficult to cut. But these harvesters are very muddy indeed. When the rice is cut and the sheaves are laid along the low mud wall of the paddy they are still partly in the sludge. We know how miserable a wet harvest is at home, but think of the slushy harvest with which most Japanese farmers struggle every year of their lives. The rice grower, although year in and year out he has the advantage of a great deal of sunshine, seldom gets his crop in without some rain. How does he manage to dry his October and November rice? By means of a temporary fence or rack which he rigs up in his paddy field or along a path or by the roadside. On this structure the sheaves are painstakingly suspended ears down. Sometimes he utilises poles suspended between trees. These trees, grown on the low banks of the paddies, have their trunks trimmed so that they resemble parasols. When the sheaves are removed in order to be threshed on the upland part of the holding, they are carried away at either end of a pole on a man's shoulder or are piled up on the back of an ox, cow or pony. The height of the pile under which some animals stagger up from the paddies gives one a vivid conception of "the last straw."