The day was hot and misty. The blue sky glowed with a thick, soft heat, and a yellowish haze blurred hedges and barns. Even the roofs of Worge seemed far away, and the sounds of the neighbouring farms were dim—but distant sounds came more clearly, a siren crooned on the far-off sea, and the mutter of guns came like a tread over the motionless air. Harry heard it as he drove the reaper, mingling with the swish of sickles and the rub of bones. For greater quickness, he had split the field into two unequal parts—the bigger one he was cutting with the reaper, the smaller was being cut by hand. Mr. Sumption, Mus’ Beatup and Elphick reaped, while Nell, the curate, Juglery and the boy from Prospect Cottages bound the sheaves. The old horse went so slowly that the sickles worked nearly as fast as the machine. After a time Harry gave up his place to his father, who had been unfitted by illness and intemperance for much strenuous work. At first there was some talking and joking among the harvesters, but soon this wore to silence in the heat. Only from where Mr. Smith and Nell stooped together over the reaped corn, gathering it into sheaves, came murmurs of sound. Nell’s pale cheeks and lips were flushed with her toil and stooping, and her eyes were bright with a pleasure which toil cannot give. Her cotton dress, the colour of the sky, set out the brightness of her hair, the colour of the corn. Her graceful, ineffectual hands, too, pleased the curate, for they were the only pair besides his in the field which were not coarse and burnt, with stubbed, black nails. Moreover, her pleasure and excitement at the day’s long promise made her more talkative than usual, and to a better purpose. He found that he liked her pleasant, blurry voice, which fled and fluttered over her words for fear that she should drawl them. The sun climbed to the zenith, and the heat not only baked down from the sky, but scorched up out of the ground. The dust of the earth and of corn-stalks filled the air with a choking, chaffy thickness. The smell of dust came from the road, and from farmyards the smell of baking mud. The black oasts of Egypt across the way swam in a cloud of heat, and the red oasts of Worge were smeared to shadows in the steam of sunshine and dust. An aching of blue and yellow was in the harvesters’ eyes, and their bodies seemed to melt and drip. The reaper crawled even more slowly, with Mus’ Beatup sagging drowsily over the reins, and Zacky drooping against old Tassell, whose flanks ran with sweat, and from whose steaming hide came ammoniacal stable smells, whiffing over the harvesters every time he passed.