year when the rains were approaching, to set the grass afire to drive the rabbits out. There was more pleasure in standing along the line of fire and whacking rabbits with a club, than toiling here to beat out this grain of the padres, superior as it was to acorns when boiled in a kettle with the cracked bones of sheep.
In this time of year the acorns were ripe. There was far more pleasure, indeed, in lying aside under a tree, watching the women beat them between stones and put them to soak in water to withdraw the evil that made the bowels knot and gripe, than to be carrying sheaves of wheat on one's shoulders, or tossing the grain in the wind to clean it of chaff and dirt. Perhaps they had thoughts such as these, the old men who went silently, with sad faces, at this labor which they never came to love.
Juan watched the threshing with a feeling over him that he had been shifted from the present into the far past. It might have been that he stood at the edge of the field where Boaz bent with his sickle, and Ruth came with timid feet far behind him, gleaning the scattered ears of grain. For surely this was not the method of modern men.
Here, on one hand, lay the grain already threshed, whether yesterday or today he did not know. It was heaped on the bare ground, filled with chaff and dirt which certain old men labored with indifferent success to remove by tossing the grain in the wind for the lighter particles to blow away. Close beside this heap of grain the trampled, broken straw
