"Indeed it was," she replied. "Whoever threw it away never thought how much it cost to make that piece of bread." And she began to tell how the hard ground must be broken by the plough, and smoothed by the harrow, to make it ready for the seed; then, after the seed has been sown and covered up, water, air, and sunlight are all needful, that the roots may sink down deep into the earth, and the green stalks shoot up into the light; so that where there was once only the bare brown field may be seen "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear"--the harvest-field in all its glory. As the "Sower's Song" says: "Fall gently and still, good corn; Lie warm in thy earthly bed, And stand so yellow some morn, For man and beast must be fed." Then come the reaping and the threshing, and the winnowing and crushing of the grain, and the making of the flour into bread, and its baking. All this must be done before our tables can be furnished with "our daily bread." [Illustration: WITH THE REAPERS.] For the birds, which "neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn," God makes the grass to grow of itself; but all those seed-bearing plants, which He has given to man, must now be cultivated. Rice needs a great deal of water that it may grow; and corn, if no care is given to its cultivation, soon becomes but a poor and useless sort of grass. It must be sown fresh every year in ground which has been made ready for it. Did you ever pluck one of the golden ears from a field of corn, and sit down and count how many grains there were upon one slender stalk? And then did you think that every little grain in that ear was itself a seed which, just as the egg contains the bird that is one day to fly and sing, wraps up within itself a young wheat-stalk with all the golden ears which may wave and rustle when next year's harvest time has come? No longer then the one lonely seed dropped by the hand of the sower into the good soil prepared for it, but many, many grains instead. So true is it that "A grain of corn an infant's hand May plant upon an inch of land, Whence twenty stalks may spring and yield, Enough to stock a little field. "The harvest of that field may then Be multiplied to ten times ten, Which, sown thrice more, would furnish bread Wherewith an army might be fed."