He found Sabina and her mother waiting for him, though they had finished with their breakfast.

“Guten morgen, Matthew,” said the baron’s wife. “Hast du gut geschlafen?”

“I had a long sleep, Frau von Dortmann,” replied Matthew, shaking his head, “but not so sound a one.”

“Is the bed not agreeable to you?”

“No, the bed is fine. It was the ghosts that kept me awake.”

The sound of laughter broke out behind him. Matthew turned to see the baron walk into the room. To all appearances he looked like a field hand.

“The mysterious sounds in your walls and our talk about old Eppie last night after dinner, eh?” he said, still laughing.

“I suppose so.”

The baron sat down and poured himself a cup of coffee. He looked to have been working already several hours. “The rye is coming along nicely,” he said to his wife. “With all this warm weather we’ve been having, it could be ready in a couple more weeks.”

Heidi brought Matthew some fresh slices of rye bread, meats, cheeses, and tea.

“Ready for what?” asked Matthew, helping himself and buttering a piece of bread.

“Ready for harvest, my boy,” answered the baron.

“Oh, I wish you could be here for it,” said Sabina. “It’s my favorite time of the year.”

“We can hardly keep her out of the fields,” laughed Marion. “Ever since she could walk, when the harvest came she followed the workers and wagons around from dawn to dusk.”

“Back in those days, so much of it was done by hand,” said the baron. “But every year there are such advances and so many ingenious new kinds of equipment, it becomes easier and easier.”

“And Papa buys every new machine the moment he learns of it, don’t you, Papa?”

“I try,” the baron said, smiling at his daughter. “We have such a great amount of grain to harvest, I’m always looking for ways to make the process more efficient. So much of the harvest, as I said, had to be carried out by hand in earlier times, in my father’s day, for instance. There might have been fifty or more workers on the estate during the summer months. But now, with the Mähdrescher and other equipment, it is so much smoother and faster. We can do the same work with fifteen or twenty, in a fraction of the time.”

“What is that, a Mähd—”

The baron laughed. “A Mähdrescher—it’s what you call a ‘combine,’ a combination harvesting machine and thresher. It was invented in your United States, in California if I’m not mistaken. It has changed the entire harvesting process.”

“Papa’s got the only one in the region,” said Sabina proudly. “If he finishes our harvest in time, he helps some of the other farmers to get in their grain too.”