"Come, ye thankful people, come;
Raise the song of Harvest Home."
Two and two the choir-boys pass, singing, up the aisle, their clear tones mingling with the deeper voices of their elders. The old men, no longer strong enough to swing a scythe or turn a furrow, sit silent. The lines on their reverent faces seem like records of hard times and bitter weather. Their working days are done. In the words the choir are singing, they are waiting to
". . . . . be gathered in,
Free from sorrow, free from sin:
All upon the Golden Floor,
Praising Thee for evermore"
The sweet notes of the anthem, "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills," roll among the dark rafters overhead. The preacher exhorts us to thankfulness, even for what we may look on as adversity. Should we be so ungracious, he asks, as to return no thanks at all because a gift turned out to be smaller than we expected? Farmers as a rule certainly have, rightly or wrongly, a reputation for, let us say, not always being so thankful as they might be. It was a yeoman of this very parish who, when congratulated once upon the extraordinary crops, all good alike, replied—"That's where 'tis; 'tis all so good we shan't have nothing to give to the poor stock!" A good discourse, straightforward and hard-hitting, true and telling.
We file out under the ancient doorway, and pass in procession under the flags and streamers and mottoes that the villagers have hung at intervals across the green lanes, to the place where, in less serious fashion, the people of the hamlet, of all sorts and conditions, are to meet on equal terms—Vicar and Lady Bountiful and dames of high degree on the one side, and farmers and labourers on the other—for a frolic in the spacious meadow. It is an ideal day for it; the air is warm, the grass is dry. Tea in the tent is the first business; a tent brave with festoons and flags and decorations. There is a hint in one of the mottoes at the shortcomings of the season—
"May the year '93