Forty beans.
Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors. Under the sun time stands almost still. Only when every minute is a physical effort do you discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one hour is very little nearer to the evening than another. People who work indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face. Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over. We of Out of Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn before a blackbird's song is over. We know the length of days. And after many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.
Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.
"I can't hoe any more," she said. "There are twenty-five more beans, but I can't hoe them."
"Why should you?" asked the nearest fairy indifferently. "The foreman never notices if we shirk. We always do."
"I said I would hoe this row," said Sarah Brown. "But I am accursed. It is a good thing at least to know one's limitations."
Even in affliction she was prosy.
"I would advise you to go and have your dinner," another fairy said. "Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now. But I left a little lemonade in your bottle. Go under the trees and drink it."
"I can't move," said Sarah Brown.
"Sit there then," said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not uprooting the weeds in their rows. Fairies are never ill. They have immortal bodies, but no souls. If they see you in pain, they simply think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their faces.