All are without parallel in nature, wrought out of his own brain by unaided man; and yet, during their life, worthy by their beauty, their purpose and their motion to challenge anything made by the gods on the earth or in the sea; and after their life is done, sublime and full of awe, so that when we come upon them neglected and see their fair, heroic curves, the dirge at their downfall passes inevitably into a pæan to their majesty. And they are very old. Probably the beasts and the birds, the winds and waves and hills know us as the creatures who make the ship, the chariot and the plough. These three things, as they go about their work, must have become universal symbols, so that when a man comes in sight, the other inhabitants of the earth say: Here is he who sails in ships and drives the chariot and guides the plough. And the greatest of all is the plough. It is without pride and also without vanity. The ship and the chariot have sometimes tried to conceal their ancient simplicity, though they have never done without it. But the plough is the same--in shape like a running hound, with tail uplifted and muzzle bowed to the scent. Richard the ploughman is worthy of his plough and team. He moves heavily with long strides over the baked yellow field, swaying with the violent motion of the plough as it cuts the stubborn and knotty soil, and yet seeming to sway out of joy and not necessity. He is a straight, small-featured, thin-lipped man, red-haired and with blue eyes of a fierce loneliness almost fanatical. Hour after hour he crosses and recrosses the field, up to the ridge, whence he can see miles of hill and wood; down to the woodside where the rabbits hardly trouble to hide as he appears, or to the thick hedge with marigolds below and nearly all day the song of nightingales. The furrow is always straight; he could plough it so asleep, and sometimes perhaps he does. The larks sing invisible in the white May sky. The swallows and woodlarks and willow wrens and linnets, with their tenderest of all mortal voices, flit and sing about him. Partridges whirr and twang. A fox steals along the hedge, a squirrel glows and ripples across a bay of the field. And for a little time he notices these things in a mild complacency. He has even formed a theory that there is another finch like a chaffinch, but not such a singer, and he calls it a piefinch. He likes the bright weather, and his cheerful greeting leaves the passer-by feeling stupid because he cannot equal it; few sounds can equal it, except the shout of a cuckoo and the abandoned clamour of a deep-voiced hound. He never becomes tired; at noon and evening in the tavern, he drinks standing, with one hand on the high door latch and the other holding the tankard, and talking all the time at the rate of one phrase to a minute, with serious mouth and distant eyes which must be symbols to help out the words, for certainly if those words mean no more than they would in