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fingers are rustling like quick mice over the stubble, and the red wheat ears are rustling together in her hands before shehas taken another step forward. There is no time for looking or listening or resting. To glean, to fill her sack, to travel over that field before the light is lost; she has no other purpose than that and could understand none.
    Long ago, in another century, she also came up to this same field, on just such still, light-flooded afternoons, for this same eternal and unchanging purpose. But not alone; they would glean then, in families, occasionally in villages, with handcarts and barrows, from early morning until evening, from one gleaning-bell to another. Since it meant so much, since corn was life — that law was as old as time itself — they gleaned incessantly, desperately. Every ear on the face of every field had to be gathered up, and she can remember her mother’s fist in her back harrying her to glean faster, and how, in turn, she also urged her children to go on and on, never to rest until the field was clear and the light had died.
    She is already away from the gate, moving quickly out into the field away from the ruts that the wagons have cut and the ears they have smashed into the sun-baked soil. She moves with incredible quickness, fretfully, almost as fearfully as she came up the hill. In her black skirt and blouse, and with her sharp white head for ever near the earth, she looks like a hungry bird, always pecking and nipping at something, never resting, never satisfied.
    Her sleeves are rolled up, showing her thin, corn-colouredarms, with the veins knotty and stiff about her bony wrists. Her hands seem to be still young in their quickness and vitality, like the young tips of an old tree, and the intent yet tranquil look on her face is eternal. It is a little, sharp, fleshless, million-wrinkled face; it is like a piece of wood, worn down by time, carved down pitilessly and relentlessly, the softness of the cheeks and mouth and eyes scooped out to make deep hollows, the bone of the cheeks and chin and forehead left high and sharp as knots in the wood. As though years of sun-flooded days in gleaning fields had stained it, the flesh is a soft, shining corn colour. Even the blue dimness of her eyes has become touched by the faintest drop of this corn-coloured radiance — the colour of age, of autumn, of dying, almost of death itself.
    In the open field the sun is very hot. Beating down from an autumn angle the force of its light and heat falls full on her back or into her eyes as she zigzags up and down or across the stubble-rows. She appears to move carelessly, without method, gleaning chance ears as she sees them; she moves, in reality, by instinct, to some ancient and inborn system, unconsciously, but surely as a bird. Miraculously she misses scarcely an ear. She moves incessantly, she looks tireless. Sometimes she glances quickly over her shoulder, across the field, into the sky, with brief unconscious anxiety about something, but the world is empty.
    It is as though there is no one in the world exceptherself who gleans any longer. She is not merely alone: she is the last of the gleaners, the last survivor of an ancient race. Nevertheless, moving across the field under the mellow sun, nipping up the ears in her quick hands, shaking her sack, dragging it over the stubble, she looks eternal. She is doing something that has been done since the beginning of time and is not conscious of it; she is concerned only with the ears, the straws, the length of the stubble, the way she must go. She scarcely notices even the flowers, ground blooming and creeping flowers that the binder cannot touch, little mouse-carpets of periwinkle and speedwell, purple coronets of knapweed, trumpets of milk-coloured and pink convolvulus, a scabious bursting a mauve bud, bits of starry camomile. Occasionally she is impatient at something — at the straggling length of the stubble, the riot of thistle