Page 583

DIABOLUS EX MACHINA
MACHINA. BY
S OME years ago I saw in an English
       journal a picture of a horse tread-
       mill engaged in threshing, and be-
       neath it was the device, "Primitive
Method of Threshing still in Use in the
Scilly Islands." As it was the same method
which we had always practised, I was filled
with mixed shame and resentment. Was my
own home at Haypoole to be coupled with
the Scilly Isles, where, as is well known, the
rare inhabitarpts eke out a miserable exist-
ence by taking in each other's washing? It
was therefore with feelings of complacency
that I received the suggestion that this year
we thresh our oats by. steam. The machin-
ery arrived in two or three ponderous wag-
ons, like a circus procession, and was duly
installed. Two men came with it, one to
run the engine and the other to feed the
oats into the machine, but it required a
small army of local talent to bring the oats
down from the bays of the barn and to carry
away the baskets of oats and the heaps of
straw and of chaff, which piled up with mi-
raculous rapidity.
   Br-r-r-r-r-rrrr! what a hideois, noisy,
 filthy machine! One of the pleasures of
 farm-work is that you can talk as much as
 you like, but the din of this engine made
.conversation impossible and gave you a
headache. We are rather proud of our
barn and consider it a substantial edifice, for
it is built of stone and measures one hundred
fifty feet by fifty, but this infernal machin-
ery shook it from top to bottom like an
aspen leaf. Fairm work is generally dlean,
but you never know how much dirt there is
in a ton of oat straw until you thresh it out
DIABOLUS  EX
ERNEST CROSBY
by steam. A little bit of smut makes the air
black, and you begin to wonder if any soil
was left in the field. In a short time the
men look like coal-heavers, their eyes turn
red, their throats raw, and there is more or
less coughing. Horses are sometimes sen-
sible animals. We brought out the refrac-
tory ones and led them up as near as we
could to the engine, in order that they might
get acquainted with it; but they absolutely
refused to cultivate friendly relations, and
every nerve in their bodies protested against
the transformation of a barn into a steam-
factory.
  For this was really what it was. We had
unwittingly taken the factory system and
planted it in the very midst ofithat most de-
lightful of rural centers, a barn. We may
be deluded into thinking that a factory is a
respectable thing in the midst of ugly city
back-alleys, but if you drop it down among
cows and fowls and horses and hay and rye
and ploughs and harrows, the monstrosity
of it can no longer be concealed. And we
had a little taste of the bad results of fac-
tory work on the workers, too. Our men
are a strong, strapping lot, but they had to
work much too fast to feed the black brute,
and the "pace that kills," of which we are all
so proud, was too much for them, and so was
the horrid noise and dust. We threshed (or
"thrashed," as the native dialect has it) for
three days; but when it was all over, on the
fourth day, the men looked as if they had
been thrashed instead of the oats, and three
were actually invalided, and the full force
did not report again for duty for two or
three days. I believe that in foundries and
certain other factories the new hands are al-
ways made ill at first. I made some in-
quiries about the steam-threshers,-the men
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