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 was thrown, carelessness, uncleanliness, disorder, over the whole that made the thought of bread repellent.

As Juan looked on this clumsy, ineffective operation the thought of the pomegranate tree went out of his mind, and of its fruit that burst in the sun and is like the red of the garnet stone. He lifted a handful of straw, finding it filled with fragments of unthreshed heads; he stirred it with his foot, to see whole grains, broken grains, fall in a shower. At least a tenth of the grain appeared to be wasted in this ancient, ignorant method of threshing. In its twenty centuries of history, Spain had not thought of a better way.

For months this threshing had been in progress at the mission, Juan knew; it must continue two or three weeks longer, calculating from the amount of grain still in the shock in that field, which was the largest and the last. Juan turned back to the mission, leaving all that he had not seen of the field of the two palms to another day. The sharp cries of the young men who drove the weary oxen in their staggering round, followed him over the high adobe wall.