[*Note: Please Credit to Sjaani]

_ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT_

David Grayson

I

"THE BURDEN OF THE VALLEY OF VISION"

I came here eight years ago as the renter of this farm, of which soonafterward I became the owner. The time before that I like to forget. Thechief impression it left, upon my memory, now happily growingindistinct, is of being hurried faster than I could well travel. Fromthe moment, as a boy of seventeen, I first began to pay my own way, mydays were ordered by an inscrutable power which drove me hourly to mytask. I was rarely allowed to look up or down, but always forward, toward that vague Success which we Americans love to glorify. 

My senses, my nerves, even my muscles were continually strained to theutmost of attainment. If I loitered or paused by the wayside, as itseems natural for me to do, I soon heard the sharp crack of the lash. For many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never rested. I neitherthought nor reflected. I had no pleasure, even though I pursued itfiercely during the brief respite of vacations. Through many feverishyears I did not work: I merely produced. 

The only real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were mylast, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, heldonly one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived. Since then Ihave tried to recall, like one who struggles to restore the visions of afever, what it was that I ran to attain, or why I should have bornewithout rebellion such indignities to soul and body. That life seemsnow, of all illusions, the most distant and unreal. It is like theunguessed eternity before we are born: not of concern compared with thateternity upon which we are now embarked. 

All these things happened in cities and among crowds. I like to forgetthem. They smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so much worsethan any mere slavery of the body. 

One day--it was in April, I remember, and the soft maples in the citypark were just beginning to blossom--I stopped suddenly. I did notintend to stop. I confess in humiliation that it was no courage, no willof my own. I intended to go on toward Success: but Fate stopped me. Itwas as if I had been thrown violently from a moving planet: all theuniverse streamed around me and past me. It seemed to me that of allanimate creation, I was the only thing that was still or silent. Until Istopped I had not known the pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy andunderstanding, never felt before, for those who left the running. I layprostrate with fever and close to death for weeks and watched the worldgo by: the dust, the noise, the very colour of haste. The only sharppang that I suffered was the feeling that I should be broken-hearted andthat I was not; that I should care and that I did not. It was as thoughI had died and escaped all further responsibility. I even watched withdim equanimity my friends racing past me, panting as they ran. Some ofthem paused an instant to comfort me where I lay, but I could see thattheir minds were still upon the running and I was glad when they wentaway. I cannot tell with what weariness their haste oppressed me. As forthem, they somehow blamed me for dropping out. I knew. Until weourselves understand, we accept no excuse from the man who stops. WhileI felt it all, I was not bitter. I did not seem to care. I said tomyself: "This is Unfitness. I survive no longer. So be it. "

Thus I lay, and presently I began to hunger and thirst. Desire rosewithin me: the indescribable longing of the convalescent for the food ofrecovery. So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required. Onemorning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me atthat moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walkingbarefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. Sovividly the memory came to me--the high airy world as it was at thatmoment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows--that the weaktears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thoughtof sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind merising still, cool, mysterious, and the fields in front stretching awayin illimitable pleasantness. I thought of the good smell of cows atmilking--you do not know, if you do not know!--I thought of the sightsand sounds, the heat and sweat of the hay fields. I thought of a certainbrook I knew when a boy that flowed among alders and wild parsnips, where I waded with a three-foot rod for trout. I thought of all thesethings as a man thinks of his first love. Oh, I craved the soil. Ihungered and thirsted for the earth. I was greedy for growing things. 

And thus, eight years ago, I came here like one sore-wounded creepingfrom the field of battle. I remember walking in the sunshine, weak yet, but curiously satisfied. I that was dead lived again. It came to me thenwith a curious certainty, not since so assuring, that I understood thechief marvel of nature hidden within the Story of the Resurrection, themarvel of plant and seed, father and son, the wonder of the seasons, themiracle of life. I, too, had died: I had lain long in darkness, and nowI had risen again upon the sweet earth. And I possessed beyond others aknowledge of a former existence, which I knew, even then, I could neverreturn to. 

For a time, in the new life, I was happy to drunkenness--working, eating, sleeping. I was an animal again, let out to run in greenpastures. I was glad of the sunrise and the sunset. I was glad at noon. It delighted me when my muscles ached with work and when, after supper, I could not keep my eyes open for sheer weariness. And sometimes I wasawakened in the night out of a sound sleep--seemingly by the verysilences--and lay in a sort of bodily comfort impossible to describe. 

I did not want to feel or to think: I merely wanted to live. In the sunor the rain I wanted to go out and come in, and never again know thepain of the unquiet spirit. I looked forward to an awakening not withoutdread for we are as helpless before birth as in the presence of death. 

But like all birth, it came, at last, suddenly. All that summer I hadworked in a sort of animal content. Autumn had now come, late autumn, with coolness in the evening air. I was plowing in my upper field--notthen mine in fact--and it was a soft afternoon with the earth turning upmoist and fragrant. I had been walking the furrows all day long. I hadtaken note, as though my life depended upon it, of the occasional stonesor roots in my field, I made sure of the adjustment of the harness, Idrove with peculiar care to save the horses. With such simple details ofthe work in hand I had found it my joy to occupy my mind. Up to thatmoment the most important things in the world had seemed a straightfurrow and well-turned corners--to me, then, a profound accomplishment. 

I cannot well describe it, save by the analogy of an opening doorsomewhere within the house of my consciousness. I had been in the dark:I seemed to emerge. I had been bound down: I seemed to leap up--and witha marvellous sudden sense of freedom and joy. 

I stopped there in my field and looked up. And it was as if I had neverlooked up before. I discovered another world. It had been there before, for long and long, but I had never seen nor felt it. All discoveries aremade in that way: a man finds the new thing, not in nature but inhimself. 

It was as though, concerned with plow and harness and furrow, I hadnever known that the world had height or colour or sweet sounds, orthat there was _feeling_ in a hillside. I forgot myself, or where I was. I stood a long time motionless. My dominant feeling, if I can at allexpress it, was of a strange new friendliness, a warmth, as though thesehills, this field about me, the woods, had suddenly spoken to me andcaressed me. It was as though I had been accepted in membership, asthough I was now recognised, after long trial, as belonging here. 

Across the town road which separates my farm from my nearestneighbour's, I saw a field, familiar, yet strangely new and unfamiliar, lying up to the setting sun, all red with autumn, above it theincalculable heights of the sky, blue, but not quite clear, owing to theIndian summer haze. I cannot convey the sweetness and softness of thatlandscape, the airiness of it, the mystery of it, as it came to me atthat moment. It was as though, looking at an acquaintance long known, Ishould discover that I loved him. As I stood there I was conscious ofthe cool tang of burning leaves and brush heaps, the lazy smoke of whichfloated down the long valley and found me in my field, and finally Iheard, as though the sounds were then made for the first time, all thevague murmurs of the country side--a cow-bell somewhere in the distance, the creak of a wagon, the blurred evening hum of birds, insects, frogs. So much it means for a man to stop and look up from his task. So Istood, and I looked up and down with a glow and a thrill which I cannotnow look back upon without some envy and a little amusement at the verygrandness and seriousness of it all. And I said aloud to myself:

"I will be as broad as the earth. I will not be limited. "

Thus I was born into the present world, and here I continue, not knowingwhat other world I may yet achieve. I do not know, but I wait inexpectancy, keeping my furrows straight and my corners well turned. Since that day in the field, though my fences include no more acres, andI still plow my own fields, my real domain has expanded until I cropwide fields and take the profit of many curious pastures. From my farm Ican see most of the world; and if I wait here long enough all peoplepass this way. 

And I look out upon them not in the surroundings which they have chosenfor themselves, but from the vantage ground of my familiar world. Thesymbols which meant so much in cities mean little here. Sometimes itseems to me as though I saw men naked. They come and stand beside myoak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; they tread my furrows and theclods give silent evidence; they touch the green blades of my corn, thecorn whispers its sure conclusions. Stern judgments that will bedeceived by no symbols!

Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling myself an unlimited farmer, and I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand ofthe soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn, or banknotes, or spindles; that we are not the used, but the users; thatlife is more than profit and loss. And so I shall expect that while I amtalking farm some of you may be thinking dry goods, banking, literature, carpentry, or what-not. But if you can say: I am an unlimited dry goodsmerchant, I am an unlimited carpenter, I will give you an old-fashionedcountry hand-shake, strong and warm. We are friends; our orbitscoincide. 

II

I BUY A FARM

As I have said, when I came here I came as a renter, working all of thefirst summer without that "open vision" of which the prophet Samuelspeaks. I had no memory of the past and no hope of the future. I fedupon the moment. My sister Harriet kept the house and I looked after thefarm and the fields. In all those months I hardly knew that I hadneighbours, although Horace, from whom I rented my place, was notinfrequently a visitor. He has since said that I looked at him as thoughhe were a "statute. " I was "citified, " Horace said; and "citified" withus here in the country is nearly the limit of invective, though notviolent enough to discourage such a gift of sociability as his. TheScotch Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I know, called once or twice, wearing the air of formality which so ill becomes him. I saw nothing inhim: it was my fault, not his, that I missed so many weeks of hisfriendship. Once in that time the Professor crossed my fields with histin box slung from his shoulder; and the only feeling I had, born ofcrowded cities, was that this was an intrusion upon my property. Intrusion: and the Professor! It is now unthinkable. I often passed theCarpentry Shop on my way to town. I saw Baxter many times at his bench. Even then Baxter's eyes attracted me: he always glanced up at me as Ipassed, and his look had in it something of a caress. So the home ofStarkweather, standing aloof among its broad lawns and tall trees, carried no meaning for me. 

Of all my neighbours, Horace is the nearest. From the back door of myhouse, looking over the hill, I can see the two red chimneys of hishome, and the top of the windmill. Horace's barn and corn silo are morepretentious by far than his house, but fortunately they stand on lowerground, where they are not visible from my side of the hill. Fiveminutes' walk in a straight line across the fields brings me to Horace'sdoor; by the road it takes at least ten minutes. 

In the fall after my arrival I had come to love the farm and itssurroundings so much that I decided to have it for my own. I did notlook ahead to being a farmer. I did not ask Harriet's advice. I foundmyself sitting one day in the justice's office. The justice was bald andas dry as corn fodder in March. He sat with spectacled impressivenessbehind his ink-stained table. Horace hitched his heel on the round ofhis chair and put his hat on his knee. He wore his best coat and hishair was brushed in deference to the occasion. He looked uncomfortable, but important. I sat opposite him, somewhat overwhelmed by the businessin hand. I felt like an inadequate boy measured against solemnities toolarge for him. The processes seemed curiously unconvincing, like a gamein which the important part is to keep from laughing; and yet when Ithought of laughing I felt cold chills of horror. If I had laughed atthat moment I cannot think what that justice would have said! But it wasa pleasure to have the old man read the deed, looking at me over hisspectacles from time to time to make sure I was not playing truant. There are good and great words in a deed. One of them I brought awaywith me from the conference, a very fine, big one, which I love to haveout now and again to remind me of the really serious things of life. Itgives me a peculiar dry, legal feeling. If I am about to enter upon aserious bargain, like the sale of a cow, I am more avaricious if I workwith it under my tongue. 

Hereditaments! Hereditaments!

Some words need to be fenced in, pig-tight, so that they cannot escapeus; others we prefer to have running at large, indefinite but inclusive. I would not look up that word for anything: I might find it fenced in sothat it could not mean to me all that it does now. 

Hereditaments! May there be many of them--or it!

Is it not a fine Providence that gives us different things to love? Inthe purchase of my farm both Horace and I got the better of thebargain--and yet neither was cheated. In reality a fairly strong lanternlight will shine through Horace, and I could see that he was hugginghimself with the joy of his bargain; but I was content. I had some moneyleft--what more does anyone want after a bargain?--and I had come intopossession of the thing I desired most of all. Looking at bargains froma purely commercial point of view, someone is always cheated, but lookedat with the simple eye both seller and buyer always win. 

We came away from the gravity of that bargaining in Horace's wagon. Onour way home Horace gave me fatherly advice about using my farm. Hespoke from the height of his knowledge to me, a humble beginner. Theconversation ran something like this:

HORACE: Thar's a clump of plum trees along the lower pasture fence. Perhaps you saw 'm----

MYSELF: I saw them: that is one reason I bought the back pasture. In Maythey will be full of blossoms. 

HORACE: They're _wild_ plums: they ain't good for nothing. 

MYSELF: But think how fine they will be all the year round. 

HORACE: Fine! They take up a quarter-acre of good land. I've been goingto cut 'em myself this ten years. 

MYSELF: I don't think I shall want them cut out. 

HORACE: Humph. 

After a pause:

HORACE: There's a lot of good body cord-wood in that oak on the knoll. 

MYSELF: Cord-wood! Why, that oak is the treasure of the whole farm, Ihave never seen a finer one. I could not think of cutting it. 

HORACE: It will bring you fifteen or twenty dollars cash in hand. 

MYSELF: But I rather have the oak. 

HORACE: Humph. 

So our conversation continued for some time. I let Horace know that Ipreferred rail fences, even old ones, to a wire fence, and that Ithought a farm should not be too large, else it might keep one away fromhis friends. And what, I asked, is corn compared with a friend? Oh, Igrew really oratorical! I gave it as my opinion that there should bevines around the house (Waste of time, said Horace), and that no farmershould permit anyone to paint medicine advertisements on his barn(Brings you ten dollars a year, said Horace), and that I proposed to fixthe bridge on the lower road (What's a path-master for? asked Horace). Isaid that a town was a useful adjunct for a farm; but I laid it down asa principle that no town should be too near a farm. I finally became soenthusiastic in setting forth my conceptions of a true farm that Ireduced Horace to a series of humphs. The early humphs were incredulous, but as I proceeded, with some joy, they became humorously contemptuous, and finally began to voice a large, comfortable, condescendingtolerance. I could fairly feel Horace growing superior as he sat therebeside me. Oh, he had everything in his favour. He could prove what hesaid: One tree + one thicket = twenty dollars. One landscape = ten cordsof wood = a quarter-acre of corn = twenty dollars. These equations provethemselves. Moreover, was not Horace the "best off" of any farmer in thecountry? Did he not have the largest barn and the best corn silo? Andare there better arguments?

Have you ever had anyone give you up as hopeless? And is it not apleasure? It is only after people resign you to your fate that youreally make friends of them. For how can you win the friendship of onewho is trying to convert you to his superior beliefs?

As we talked, then, Horace and I, I began to have hopes of him. There isno joy comparable to the making of a friend, and the more resistant thematerial the greater the triumph. Baxter, the carpenter, says that whenhe works for enjoyment he chooses curly maple. 

When Horace set me down at my gate that afternoon he gave me his handand told me that he would look in on me occasionally, and that if I hadany trouble to let him know. 

A few days later I heard by the roundabout telegraph common in countryneighbourhoods that Horace had found a good deal of fun in reportingwhat I said about farming and that he had called me by a highly humorousbut disparaging name. Horace has a vein of humour all his own. I havecaught him alone in his fields chuckling to himself, and even breakingout in a loud laugh at the memory of some amusing incident thathappened ten years ago. One day, a month or more after our bargain, Horace came down across his field and hitched his jean-clad leg over myfence, with the intent, I am sure, of delving a little more in the samerich mine of humour. 

"Horace, " I said, looking him straight in the eye, "did you call mean--Agriculturist!"

I have rarely seen a man so pitifully confused as Horace was at thatmoment. He flushed, he stammered, he coughed, the perspiration broke outon his forehead. He tried to speak and could not. I was sorry for him. 

"Horace, " I said, "you're a Farmer. "

We looked at each other a moment with dreadful seriousness, and thenboth of us laughed to the point of holding our sides. We slapped ourknees, we shouted, we wriggled, we almost rolled with merriment. Horaceput out his hand and we shook heartily. In five minutes I had the wholestory of his humorous reports out of him. 

No real friendship is ever made without an initial clashing whichdiscloses the metal of each to each. Since that day Horace's jean-cladleg has rested many a time on my fence and we have talked crops andcalves. We have been the best of friends in the way of whiffle-trees, butter tubs and pig killings--but never once looked up together at thesky. 

The chief objection to a joke in the country is that it is soimperishable. There is so much room for jokes and so few jokes to fillit. When I see Horace approaching with a peculiar, friendly, reminiscentsmile on his face I hasten with all ardour to anticipate him:

"Horace, " I exclaim, "you're a Farmer. "

[Illustration: "The heat and sweat of the hay fields"]

III

THE JOY OF POSSESSION

"How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees:How graceful climb these shadows on my hill. "

Always as I travel, I think, "Here I am, let anything happen!"

I do not want to know the future; knowledge is too certain, too cold, too real. 

It is true that I have not always met the fine adventure nor won thefriend, but if I had, what should I have more to look for at otherturnings and other hilltops?

The afternoon of my purchase was one of the great afternoons of my life. When Horace put me down at my gate, I did not go at once to the house;I did not wish, then, to talk with Harriet. The things I had with myselfwere too important. I skulked toward my barn, compelling myself to walkslowly until I reached the corner, where I broke into an eager run asthough the old Nick himself were after me. Behind the barn I droppeddown on the grass, panting with laughter, and not without some of theshame a man feels at being a boy. Close along the side of the barn, as Isat there in the cool of the shade, I could see a tangled mat ofsmartweed and catnip, and the boards of the barn, brown andweather-beaten, and the gables above with mud swallows' nests, nowdeserted; and it struck me suddenly, as I observed these homely pleasantthings:

"All this is mine. "

I sprang up and drew a long breath. 

"Mine, " I said. 

It came to me then like an inspiration that I might now go out and takeformal possession of my farm. I might experience the emotion of alandowner. I might swell with dignity and importance--for once, atleast. 

So I started at the fence corner back of the barn and walked straightup through the pasture, keeping close to my boundaries, that I might notmiss a single rod of my acres. And oh, it was a prime afternoon! TheLord made it! Sunshine--and autumn haze--and red trees--and yellowfields--and blue distances above the far-away town. And the air had atang which got into a man's blood and set him chanting all the poetry heever knew. 

"I climb that was a clod, I run whose steps were slow, I reap the very wheat of God That once had none to sow!"

So I walked up the margin of my field looking broadly about me: andpresently, I began to examine my fences--_my_ fences--with a criticaleye. I considered the quality of the soil, though in truth I was notmuch of a judge of such matters. I gloated over my plowed land, lyingthere open and passive in the sunshine. I said of this tree: "It ismine, " and of its companion beyond the fence: "It is my neighbour's. "Deeply and sharply within myself I drew the line between _meum_ and_tuum_: for only thus, by comparing ourselves with our neighbours, canwe come to the true realisation of property. Occasionally I stopped topick up a stone and cast it over the fence, thinking with sometruculence that my neighbour would probably throw it back again. Nevermind, I had it out of _my_ field. Once, with eager surplusage of energy, I pulled down a dead and partly rotten oak stub, long an eye-sore, withan important feeling of proprietorship. I could do anything I liked. Thefarm was _mine_. 

How sweet an emotion is possession! What charm is inherent in ownership!What a foundation for vanity, even for the greater quality ofself-respect, lies in a little property! I fell to thinking of theexcellent wording of the old books in which land is called "realproperty, " or "real estate. " Money we may possess, or goods or chattels, but they give no such impression of mineness as the feeling that one'sfeet rest upon soil that is his: that part of the deep earth is his withall the water upon it, all small animals that creep or crawl in theholes of it, all birds or insects that fly in the air above it, alltrees, shrubs, flowers, and grass that grow upon it, all houses, barnsand fences--all, his. As I strode along that afternoon I fed uponpossession. I rolled the sweet morsel of ownership under my tongue. Iseemed to set my feet down more firmly on the good earth. I straightenedmy shoulders: _this land was mine_. I picked up a clod of earth and letit crumble and drop through my fingers: it gave me a peculiar andpoignant feeling of possession. I can understand why the miser enjoysthe very physical contact of his gold. Every sense I possessed, sight, hearing, smell, touch, led upon the new joy. 

At one corner of my upper field the fence crosses an abrupt ravine uponleggy stilts. My line skirts the slope halfway up. My neighbour owns thecrown of the hill which he has shorn until it resembles the tonsuredpate of a monk. Every rain brings the light soil down the ravine andlays it like a hand of infertility upon my farm. It had always botheredme, this wastage; and as I looked across my fence I thought to myself:

"I must have that hill. I will buy it. I will set the fence farther up. I will plant the slope. It is no age of tonsures either in religion oragriculture. "

The very vision of widened acres set my thoughts on fire. Inimagination I extended my farm upon all sides, thinking how much betterI could handle my land than my neighbours. I dwelt avariciously uponmore possessions: I thought with discontent of my poverty. More land Iwanted. I was enveloped in clouds of envy. I coveted my neighbour'sland: I felt myself superior and Horace inferior: I was consumed withblack vanity. 

So I dealt hotly with these thoughts until I reached the top of theridge at the farther corner of my land. It is the highest point on thefarm. 

For a moment I stood looking about me on a wonderful prospect of serenebeauty. As it came to me--hills, fields, woods--the fever which had beenconsuming me died down. I thought how the world stretched away from myfences--just such fields--for a thousand miles, and in each smallenclosure a man as hot as I with the passion of possession. How they allenvied, and hated, in their longing for more land! How property keptthem apart, prevented the close, confident touch of friendship, how itseparated lovers and ruined families! Of all obstacles to that completedemocracy of which we dream, is there a greater than property?

I was ashamed. Deep shame covered me. How little of the earth, afterall, I said, lies within the limits of my fences. And I looked out uponthe perfect beauty of the world around me, and I saw how little excitedit was, how placid, how undemanding. 

I had come here to be free and already this farm, which I thought of sofondly as my possession, was coming to possess me. Ownership is anappetite like hunger or thirst, and as we may eat to gluttony and drinkto drunkenness so we may possess to avarice. How many men have I seenwho, though they regard themselves as models of temperance, wear themarks of unbridled indulgence of the passion of possession, and how likegluttony or licentiousness it sets its sure sign upon their faces. 

I said to myself, Why should any man fence himself in? And why hope toenlarge one's world by the creeping acquisition of a few acres to hisfarm? I thought of the old scientist, who, laying his hand upon thegrass, remarked: "Everything under my hand is a miracle"--forgettingthat everything outside was also a miracle. 

[Illustration: "HOW GRACEFUL CLIMB THESE SHADOWS ON MY HILL"]

As I stood there I glanced across the broad valley wherein lies the mostof my farm, to a field of buckwheat which belongs to Horace. For aninstant it gave me the illusion of a hill on fire: for the late sunshone full on the thick ripe stalks of the buckwheat, giving forth anabundant red glory that blessed the eye. Horace had been proud of hiscrop, smacking his lips at the prospect of winter pancakes, and here Iwas entering his field and taking without hindrance another crop, a cropgathered not with hands nor stored in granaries: a wonderful crop, which, once gathered, may long be fed upon and yet remain unconsumed. 

So I looked across the countryside; a group of elms here, a tuftedhilltop there, the smooth verdure of pastures, the rich brown ofnew-plowed fields--and the odours, and the sounds of the country--allcropped by me. How little the fences keep me out: I do not regardtitles, nor consider boundaries. I enter either by day or by night, butnot secretly. Taking my fill, I leave as much as I find. 

And thus standing upon the highest hill in my upper pasture, I thoughtof the quoted saying of a certain old abbot of the middle ages--"Hethat is a true monk considers nothing as belonging to him except alyre. "

What finer spirit? Who shall step forth freer than he who goes withnothing save his lyre? He shall sing as he goes: he shall not be helddown nor fenced in. 

With a lifting of the soul I thought of that old abbot, how smooth hisbrow, how catholic his interest, how serene his outlook, how free hisfriendships, how unlimited his whole life. Nothing but a lyre!

So I made a covenant there with myself. I said: "I shall use, not beused. I do not limit myself here. I shall not allow possessions to comebetween me and my life or my friends. "

For a time--how long I do not know--I stood thinking. Presently Idiscovered, moving slowly along the margin of the field below me, theold professor with his tin botany box. And somehow I had no feeling thathe was intruding upon my new land. His walk was slow and methodical, hishead and even his shoulders were bent--almost habitually--from lookingclose upon the earth, and from time to time he stooped, and once heknelt to examine some object that attracted his eye. It seemedappropriate that he should thus kneel to the earth. So he gathered _his_crop and fences did not keep him out nor titles disturb him. He also wasfree! It gave me at that moment a peculiar pleasure to have him on myland, to know that I was, if unconsciously, raising other crops than Iknew. I felt friendship for this old professor: I could understand him, I thought. And I said aloud but in a low tone, as though I wereaddressing him:

--Do not apologise, friend, when you come into my field. You do notinterrupt me. What you have come for is of more importance at thismoment than corn. Who is it that says I must plow so many furrows thisday? Come in, friend, and sit here on these clods: we will sweeten theevening with fine words. We will invest our time not in corn, or incash, but in life. --

I walked with confidence down the hill toward the professor. Soengrossed was he with his employment that he did not see me until I waswithin a few paces of him. When he looked up at me it was as though hiseyes returned from some far journey. I felt at first out of focus, unplaced, and only gradually coming into view. In his hand he held alump of earth containing a thrifty young plant of the purplecone-flower, having several blossoms. He worked at the lump deftly, delicately, so that the earth, pinched, powdered and shaken out, fellbetween his fingers, leaving the knotty yellow roots in his hand. Imarked how firm, slow, brown, the old man was, how little obtrusive inmy field. One foot rested in a furrow, the other was set among the grassof the margin, near the fence--his place, I thought. 

His first words, though of little moment in themselves, gave me acurious satisfaction, as when a coin, tested, rings true gold, or ahero, tried, is heroic. 

"I have rarely, " he said, "seen a finer display of rudbeckia than this, along these old fences. "

If he had referred to me, or questioned, or apologised, I should havebeen disappointed. He did not say, "your fences, " he said "thesefences, " as though they were as much his as mine. And he spoke in hisown world, knowing that if I could enter I would, but that if I couldnot, no stooping to me would avail either of us. 

"It has been a good autumn for flowers, " I said inanely, for so manythings were flying through my mind that I could not at once think of thegreat particular words which should bring us together. At first Ithought my chance had passed, but he seemed to see something in me afterall, for he said:

"Here is a peculiarly large specimen of the rudbeckia. Observe the deeppurple of the cone, and the bright yellow of the petals. Here is anotherthat grew hardly two feet away, in the grass near the fence where therails and the blackberry bushes have shaded it. How small andundeveloped it is. "

"They crowd up to the plowed land, " I observed. 

"Yes, they reach out for a better chance in life--like men. With moreroom, better food, freer air, you see how much finer they grow. "

It was curious to me, having hitherto barely observed the cone-flowersalong my fences, save as a colour of beauty, how simply we fell totalking of them as though in truth they were people like ourselves, having our desires and possessed of our capabilities. It gave me then, for the first time, the feeling which has since meant such variedenjoyment, of the peopling of the woods. 

"See here, " he said, "how different the character of these individuals. They are all of the same species. They all grow along this fence withintwo or three rods; but observe the difference not only in size but incolouring, in the shape of the petals, in the proportions of the cone. What does it all mean? Why, nature trying one of her endlessexperiments. She sows here broadly, trying to produce bettercone-flowers. A few she plants on the edge of the field in the hope thatthey may escape the plow. If they grow, better food and more sunshineproduce more and larger flowers. "

So we talked, or rather he talked, finding in me an eager listener. Andwhat he called botany seemed to me to be life. Of birth, of growth, ofreproduction, of death, he spoke, and his flowers became sentientcreatures under my eyes. 

And thus the sun went down and the purple mists crept silently along thedistant low spots, and all the great, great mysteries came and stoodbefore me beckoning and questioning. They came and they stood, and outof the cone-flower, as the old professor spoke, I seemed to catch aglimmer of the true light. I reflected how truly everything is inanything. If one could really understand a cone-flower he couldunderstand this Earth. Botany was only one road toward the Explanation. 

Always I hope that some traveller may have more news of the way than I, and sooner or later, I find I must make inquiry of the direction ofevery thoughtful man I meet. And I have always had especial hope ofthose who study the sciences: they ask such intimate questions ofnature. Theology possesses a vain-gloriousness which places its faith inhuman theories; but science, at its best, is humble before natureherself. It has no thesis to defend: it is content to kneel upon theearth, in the way of my friend, the old professor, and ask the simplestquestions, hoping for some true reply. 

I wondered, then, what the professor thought, after his years of work, of the Mystery; and finally, not without confusion, I asked him. Helistened, for the first time ceasing to dig, shake out and arrange hisspecimens. When I had stopped speaking he remained for a moment silent, then he looked at me with a new regard. Finally he quoted quietly, butwith a deep note in his voice:

"Canst thou by searching find God? Canst thoufind out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as highas heaven: what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know?"

When the professor had spoken we stood for a moment silent, then hesmiled and said briskly:

"I have been a botanist for fifty-four years. When I was a boy Ibelieved implicitly in God. I prayed to him, having a vision of him--aperson--before my eyes. As I grew older I concluded that there was noGod. I dismissed him from the universe. I believed only in what I couldsee, or hear, or feel. I talked about Nature and Reality. "

He paused, the smile still lighting his face, evidently recalling tohimself the old days. I did not interrupt him. Finally he turned to meand said abruptly. 

"And now--it seems to me--there is nothing but God. "

As he said this he lifted his arm with a peculiar gesture that seemedto take in the whole world. 

For a time we were both silent. When I left him I offered my hand andtold him I hoped I might become his friend. So I turned my face towardhome. Evening was falling, and as I walked I heard the crows calling, and the air was keen and cool, and I thought deep thoughts. 

And so I stepped into the darkened stable. I could not see the outlinesof the horse or the cow, but knowing the place so well I could easilyget about. I heard the horse step aside with a soft expectant whinny. Ismelled the smell of milk, the musty, sharp odour of dry hay, thepungent smell of manure, not unpleasant. And the stable was warm afterthe cool of the fields with a sort of animal warmth that struck into mesoothingly. I spoke in a low voice and laid my hand on the horse'sflank. The flesh quivered and shrunk away from my touch--coming backconfidently, warmly. I ran my hand along his back and up his hairy neck. I felt his sensitive nose in my hand. "You shall have your oats, " Isaid, and I gave him to eat. Then I spoke as gently to the cow, and shestood aside to be milked. 

And afterward I came out into the clear bright night, and the air wassweet and cool, and my dog came bounding to meet me. --So I carried themilk into the house, and Harriet said in her heartiest tone:

"You are late, David. But sit up, I have kept the biscuits warm. "

And that night my sleep was sound. 

IV

ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES

With the coming of winter I thought the life of a farmer might losesomething of its charm. So much interest lies in the growth not only ofcrops but of trees, vines, flowers, sentiments and emotions. In thesummer the world is busy, concerned with many things and full of gossip:in the winter I anticipated a cessation of many active interests andenthusiasms. I looked forward to having time for my books and for thequiet contemplation of the life around me. Summer indeed is foractivity, winter for reflection. But when winter really came every daydiscovered some new work to do or some new adventure to enjoy. It issurprising how many things happen on a small farm. Examining the bookwhich accounts for that winter, I find the history of part of aforenoon, which will illustrate one of the curious adventures of afarmer's life. It is dated January 5. 

 * * * * *

I went out this morning with my axe and hammer to mend the fence alongthe public road. A heavy frost fell last night and the brown grass andthe dry ruts of the roads were powdered white. Even the air, which wasperfectly still, seemed full of frost crystals, so that when the suncame up one seemed to walk in a magic world. I drew in a long breath andlooked out across the wonderful shining country and I said to myself:

"Surely, there is nowhere I would rather be than here. " For I could havetravelled nowhere to find greater beauty or a better enjoyment of itthan I had here at home. 

As I worked with my axe and hammer, I heard a light wagon come rattlingup the road. Across the valley a man had begun to chop a tree. I couldsee the axe steel flash brilliantly in the sunshine before I heard thesound of the blow. 

The man in the wagon had a round face and a sharp blue eye. I thought heseemed a businesslike young man. 

"Say, there, " he shouted, drawing up at my gate, "would you mind holdingmy horse a minute? It's a cold morning and he's restless. "

"Certainly not, " I said, and I put down my tools and held his horse. 

He walked up to my door with a brisk step and a certain jaunty poise ofthe head. 

"He is well contented with himself, " I said. "It is a great blessing forany man to be satisfied with what he has got. "

I heard Harriet open the door--how every sound rang through the stillmorning air!

The young man asked some question and I distinctly heard Harriet'sanswer:

"He's down there. "

The young man came back: his hat was tipped up, his quick eye dartedover my grounds as though in a single instant he had appraisedeverything and passed judgment upon the cash value of the inhabitants. He whistled a lively little tune. 

"Say, " he said, when he reached the gate, not at all disconcerted, "Ithought you was the hired man. Your name's Grayson, ain't it? Well, Iwant to talk with you. "

After tying and blanketing his horse and taking a black satchel from hisbuggy he led me up to my house. I had a pleasurable sense of excitementand adventure. Here was a new character come to my farm. Who knows, Ithought, what he may bring with him: who knows what I may send away byhim? Here in the country we must set our little ships afloat on smallstreams, hoping that somehow, some day, they will reach the sea. 

It was interesting to see the busy young man sit down so confidently inour best chair. He said his name was Dixon, and he took out from hissatchel a book with a fine showy cover. He said it was called "LivingSelections from Poet, Sage and Humourist. "

"This, " he told me, "is only the first of the series. We publish sixvolumes full of literchoor. You see what a heavy book this is?"

I tested it in my hand: it was a heavy book. 

"The entire set, " he said, "weighs over ten pounds. There are 1, 162pages, enough paper if laid down flat, end to end, to reach half amile. "

I cannot quote his exact language: there was too much of it, but he madean impressive showing of the amount of literature that could be had at avery low price per pound. Mr. Dixon was a hypnotist. He fixed me withhis glittering eye, and he talked so fast, and his ideas upon thesubject were so original that he held me spellbound. At first I wasinclined to be provoked: one does not like to be forcibly hypnotised, but gradually the situation began to amuse me, the more so when Harrietcame in. 

"Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?" asked the agent, holdinghis book admiringly at arm's length. "This up here, " he said, pointingto the illuminated cover, "is the Muse of Poetry She is scatteringflowers--poems, you know. Fine idea, ain't it? Colouring fine, too. "

He jumped up quickly and laid the book on my table, to the evidentdistress of Harriet. 

"Trims up the room, don't it?" he exclaimed, turning his head a littleto one side and observing the effect with an expression of affectionateadmiration. 

"How much, " I asked, "will you sell the covers for without theinsides?"

"Without the insides?"

"Yes, " I said, "the binding will trim up my table just as well withoutthe insides. "

I thought he looked at me a little suspiciously, but he was evidentlysatisfied by my expression of countenance, for he answered promptly:

"Oh, but you want the insides. That's what the books are for. Thebindings are never sold alone. "

He then went on to tell me the prices and terms of payment, until itreally seemed that it would be cheaper to buy the books than to let himcarry them away again. Harriet stood in the doorway behind him frowningand evidently trying to catch my eye. But I kept my face turned aside sothat I could not see her signal of distress and my eyes fixed on theyoung man Dixon. It was as good as a play. Harriet there, serious-minded, thinking I was being befooled, and the agent thinking hewas befooling me, and I, thinking I was befooling both of them--and allof us wrong. It was very like life wherever you find it. 

Finally, I took the book which he had been urging upon me, at whichHarriet coughed meaningly to attract my attention. She knew the dangerwhen I really got my hands on a book. But I made up as innocent as achild. I opened the book almost at random--and it was as though, walkingdown a strange road, I had come upon an old tried friend not seen beforein years. For there on the page before me I read:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The winds that will be howling at all hours, But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not. "

And as I read it came back to me--a scene like a picture--the place, thetime, the very feel of the hour when I first saw those lines. Who shallsay that the past does not live! An odour will sometimes set the bloodcoursing in an old emotion, and a line of poetry is the resurrection andthe life. For a moment I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot myself, I even forgot the book on my knee--everything but that hour in thepast--a view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat and dust and noise ofan August evening in the city, the dumb weariness of it all, theloneliness, the longing for green fields; and then these great lines ofWordsworth, read for the first time, flooding in upon me:

 "Great God! I'd rather beA pagan suckled in a creed outworn:So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;And hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. "

When I had finished I found myself standing in my own room with one armraised, and, I suspect, a trace of tears in my eyes--there before theagent and Harriet. I saw Harriet lift one hand and drop it hopelessly. She thought I was captured at last. I was past saving. And as I lookedat the agent I saw "grim conquest glowing in his eye!" So I sat down nota little embarrassed by my exhibition--when I had intended to beself-poised. 

"You like it, don't you?" said Mr. Dixon unctuously. 

"I don't see, " I said earnestly, "how you can afford to sell suchthings as this so cheap. "

"They _are_ cheap, " he admitted regretfully. I suppose he wished he hadtried me with the half-morocco. 

"They are priceless, " I said, "absolutely priceless. If you were theonly man in the world who had that poem, I think I would deed you myfarm for it. "

Mr. Dixon proceeded, as though it were all settled, to get out his blackorder book and open it briskly for business. He drew his fountain pen, capped it, and looked up at me expectantly. My feet actually seemedslipping into some irresistible whirlpool. How well he understoodpractical psychology! I struggled within myself, fearing engulfment: Iwas all but lost. 

"Shall I deliver the set at once, " he said, "or can you wait until thefirst of February?"

At that critical moment a floating spar of an idea swept my way and Iseized upon it as the last hope of the lost. 

[Illustration: 'Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?']

"I don't understand, " I said, as though I had not heard his lastquestion, "how you dare go about with all this treasure upon you. Areyou not afraid of being stopped in the road and robbed? Why, I've seenthe time when, if I had known you carried such things as these, suchcures for sick hearts, I think I should have stopped you myself!"

"Say, you _are_ an odd one, " said Mr. Dixon. 

"Why do you sell such priceless things as these?" I asked, looking athim sharply. 

"Why do I sell them?" and he looked still more perplexed. "To makemoney, of course; same reason you raise corn. "

"But here is wealth, " I said, pursuing my advantage. "If you have theseyou have something more valuable than money. "

Mr. Dixon politely said nothing. Like a wise angler, having failed toland me at the first rush, he let me have line. Then I thought ofRuskin's words, "Nor can any noble thing be wealth except to a nobleperson. " And that prompted me to say to Mr. Dixon:

"These things are not yours; they are mine. You never owned them; but Iwill sell them to you. "

He looked at me in amazement, and then glanced around--evidently todiscover if there were a convenient way of escape. 

"You're all straight, are you?" he asked tapping his forehead; "didn'tanybody ever try to take you up?"

"The covers are yours, " I continued as though I had not heard him, "theinsides are mine and have been for a long time: that is why I proposedbuying the covers separately. "

I opened his book again. I thought I would see what had been chosen forits pages. And I found there many fine and great things. 

"Let me read you this, " I said to Mr. Dixon; "it has been mine for along time. I will not sell it to you. I will give it to you outright. The best things are always given. "

Having some gift in imitating the Scotch dialect, I read:

 "November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh; The shortening winter day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, This night his weekly moil is at an end, Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend. "

So I read "The Cotter's Saturday Night. " I love the poem very muchmyself, sometimes reading it aloud, not so much for the tenderness ofits message, though I prize that, too, as for the wonder of its music:

 "Compared with these, Italian trills are tame; The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise. "

I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice. As I glanced up from time totime I saw the agent's face change, and his look deepen and the lips, usually so energetically tense, loosen with emotion. Surely no poem inall the language conveys so perfectly the simple love of the home, thequiet joys, hopes, pathos of those who live close to the soil. 

When I had finished--I stopped with the stanza beginning:

 "Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way";

the agent turned away his head trying to brave out his emotion. Most ofus, Anglo-Saxons, tremble before a tear when we might fearlessly beard atiger. 

I moved up nearer to the agent and put my hand on his knee; then I readtwo or three of the other things I found in his wonderful book. And onceI had him laughing and once again I had the tears in his eyes. Oh, asimple young man, a little crusty without, but soft inside--like therest of us. 

Well, it was amazing once we began talking not of books but of life, howreally eloquent and human he became. From being a distant anduncomfortable person, he became at once like a near neighbour andfriend. It was strange to me--as I have thought since--how he conveyedto us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was noviolin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simplevoice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home. The very incongruity of detail--he told us how he grew onions in hisback yard--added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision which hegave us. The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottageorgan, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in SeventeenthStreet--were all, curiously, fabrics of his emotion. 

It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phosphorescent in theheat of true feeling. How little we may come to know Romance by thecloak she wears and how humble must be he who would surprise the heartof her!

It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill that I heard him add thedetails, one by one--the mortgage on his place, now rapidly being paidoff, the brother who was a plumber, the mother-in-law who was not amother-in-law of the comic papers. And finally he showed us the pictureof the wife and baby that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat babywith its head resting on its mother's shoulder. 

"Mister, " he said, "p'raps you think it's fun to ride around the countrylike I do, and be away from home most of the time. But it ain't. When Ithink of Minnie and the kid--"

He broke off sharply, as if he had suddenly remembered the shame of suchconfidences. 

"Say, " he asked, "what page is that poem on?"

I told him. 

"One forty-six, " he said. "When I get home I'm going to read that toMinnie. She likes poetry and all such things. And where's that otherpiece that tells how a man feels when he's lonesome? Say, that fellowknew!"

We had a genuinely good time, the agent and I, and when he finally roseto go, I said:

"Well, I've sold you a new book. "

"I see now, mister, what you mean. "

I went down the path with him and began to unhitch his horse. 

"Let me, let me, " he said eagerly. 

Then he shook hands, paused a moment awkwardly as if about to saysomething, then sprang into his buggy without saying it. 

When he had taken up his reins he remarked:

"Say! but you'd make an agent! You'd hypnotise 'em. "

I recognised it as the greatest compliment he could pay me: the craftcompliment. 

Then he drove off, but pulled up before he had gone five yards. Heturned in his seat, one hand on the back of it, his whip raised. 

"Say!" he shouted, and when I walked up he looked at me with fineembarrassment. 

"Mister, perhaps you'd accept one of these sets from Dixon free gratis, for nothing. "

"I understand, " I said, "but you know I'm giving the books to you--and Icouldn't take them back again. "

"Well, " he said, "you're a good one, anyhow. Good-bye again, " and then, suddenly, business naturally coming uppermost, he remarked with greatenthusiasm:

"You've given me a new idea. _Say_, I'll sell 'em. "

"Carry them carefully, man, " I called after him; "they are precious. "

So I went back to my work, thinking how many fine people there are inthis world--if you scratch 'em deep enough. 

[Illustration: "Horace 'hefted' it"]

V

THE AXE-HELVE

_April the 15th. _

This morning I broke my old axe handle. I went out early while the fogstill filled the valley and the air was cool and moist as it had comefresh from the filter of the night. I drew a long breath and let my axefall with all the force I could give it upon a new oak log. I swung itunnecessarily high for the joy of doing it and when it struck itcommunicated a sharp yet not unpleasant sting to the palms of my hands. The handle broke short off at the point where the helve meets the steel. The blade was driven deep in the oak wood. I suppose I should haveregretted my foolishness, but I did not. The handle was old and somewhatworn, and the accident gave me an indefinable satisfaction: theculmination of use, that final destruction which is the complement ofgreat effort. 

This feeling was also partly prompted by the thought of the new helve Ialready had in store, awaiting just such a catastrophe. Having comesomewhat painfully by that helve, I really wanted to see it in use. 

Last spring, walking in my fields, I looked out along the fences for awell-fitted young hickory tree of thrifty second growth, bare of knotsat least head high, without the cracks or fissures of too rapid growthor the doziness of early transgression. What I desired was a fine, healthy tree fitted for a great purpose and I looked for it as I wouldlook for a perfect man to save a failing cause. At last I found asapling growing in one of the sheltered angles of my rail fence. It wasset about by dry grass, overhung by a much larger cherry tree, andbearing still its withered last year's leaves, worn diaphanous butcurled delicately, and of a most beautiful ash gray colour, somethinglike the fabric of a wasp's nest, only yellower. I gave it a shake andit sprung quickly under my hand like the muscle of a good horse. Itsbark was smooth and trim, its bole well set and solid. 

A perfect tree! So I came up again with my short axe and after clearingaway the grass and leaves with which the wind had mulched it, I cut intothe clean white roots. I had no twinge of compunction, for was this notfulfillment? Nothing comes of sorrow for worthy sacrifice. When I hadlaid the tree low, I clipped off the lower branches, snapped off the topwith a single clean stroke of the axe, and shouldered as pretty asecond-growth sapling stick as anyone ever laid his eyes upon. 

I carried it down to my barn and put it on the open rafters over the cowstalls. A cow stable is warm and not too dry, so that a hickory logcures slowly without cracking or checking. There it lay for many weeks. Often I cast my eyes up at it with satisfaction, watching the barkshrink and slightly deepen in colour, and once I climbed up where Icould see the minute seams making way in the end of the stick. 

In the summer I brought the stick into the house, and put it in the dry, warm storeroom over the kitchen where I keep my seed corn. I do notsuppose it really needed further attention, but sometimes when I chancedto go into the storeroom, I turned it over with my foot. I felt a sortof satisfaction in knowing that it was in preparation for service: goodmaterial for useful work. So it lay during the autumn and far into thewinter. 

One cold night when I sat comfortably at my fireplace, listening to thewind outside, and feeling all the ease of a man at peace with himself, my mind took flight to my snowy field sides and I thought of the treesthere waiting and resting through the winter. So I came in imaginationto the particular corner in the fence where I had cut my hickorysapling. Instantly I started up, much to Harriet's astonishment, andmade my way mysteriously up the kitchen stairs. I would not tell what Iwas after: I felt it a sort of adventure, almost like the joy of seeinga friend long forgotten. It was as if my hickory stick had cried out atlast, after long chrysalishood:

"I am ready. "

I stood it on end and struck it sharply with my knuckles: it rang outwith a certain clear resonance. 

"I am ready. "

I sniffed at the end of it. It exhaled a peculiar good smell, as of oldfields in the autumn. 

"I am ready. "

So I took it under my arm and carried it down. 

"Mercy, what are you going to do?" exclaimed Harriet. 

"Deliberately, and with malice aforethought, " I responded, "I am goingto litter up your floor. I have decided to be reckless. I don't carewhat happens. "

Having made this declaration, which Harriet received with becomingdisdain, I laid the log by the fireplace--not too near--and went tofetch a saw, a hammer, a small wedge, and a draw-shave. 

I split my log into as fine white sections as a man ever saw--everypiece as straight as morality, and without so much as a sliver to marit. Nothing is so satisfactory as to have a task come out in perfecttime and in good order. The little pieces of bark and sawdust I sweptscrupulously into the fireplace, looking up from time to time to see howHarriet was taking it. Harriet was still disdainful. 

Making an axe-helve is like writing a poem (though I never wrote one). The material is free enough, but it takes a poet to use it. Some peopleimagine that any fine thought is poetry, but there was never a greatermistake. A fine thought, to become poetry, must be seasoned in the upperwarm garrets of the mind for long and long, then it must be brought downand slowly carved into words, shaped with emotion, polished with love. Else it is no true poem. Some people imagine that any hickory stick willmake an axe-helve. But this is far from the truth. When I had whittledaway for several evenings with my draw-shave and jack-knife, both ofwhich I keep sharpened to the keenest edge, I found that my work was notprogressing as well as I had hoped. 

"This is more of a task, " I remarked one evening, "than I had imagined. "

Harriet, rocking placidly in her arm-chair, was mending a number ofpairs of new socks, Poor Harriet! Lacking enough old holes to occupy herenergies, she mends holes that may possibly appear. A frugal person!

"Well, David, " she said, "I warned you that you could buy a helvecheaper than you could make it. "

"So I can buy a book cheaper than I can write it, " I responded. 

I felt somewhat pleased with my return shot, though I took pains not toshow it. I squinted along my hickory stick which was even then beginningto assume, rudely, the outlines of an axe-handle. I had made aprodigious pile of fine white shavings and I was tired, but quitesuddenly there came over me a sort of love for that length of wood. Isprung it affectionately over my knee, I rubbed it up and down with myhand, and then I set it in the corner behind the fireplace. 

"After all, " I said, for I had really been disturbed by Harriet'sremark--"after all, power over one thing gives us power over everything. When you mend socks prospectively--into futurity--Harriet, that is anevidence of true greatness. "

"Sometimes I think it doesn't pay, " remarked Harriet, though she wasplainly pleased. 

"Pretty good socks, " I said, "can be bought for fifteen cents a pair. "

Harriet looked at me suspiciously, but I was as sober as the face ofnature. 

For the next two or three evenings I let the axe-helve stand alone inthe corner. I hardly looked at it, though once in a while, when occupiedwith some other work, I would remember, or rather half remember, that Ihad a pleasure in store for the evening. The very thought of sharp toolsand something, to make with them acts upon the imagination with peculiarzest. So we love to employ the keen edge of the mind upon a knotty anddifficult subject. 

One evening the Scotch preacher came in. We love him very much, thoughhe sometimes makes us laugh--perhaps, in part, because he makes uslaugh. Externally he is a sort of human cocoanut, rough, brown, shaggy, but within he has the true milk of human kindness. Some of his qualitiestouch greatness. His youth was spent in stony places where strong windsblew; the trees where he grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug wasfull of roots. But the crop was human love. He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred exclusively in the country, of magnanimity towardthe unlike. In the country we are tempted to throw stones at strangehats! But to the Scotch preacher every man in one way seems transparentto the soul. He sees the man himself, not his professions any more thanhis clothes. And I never knew anyone who had such an abiding disbeliefin the wickedness of the human soul. Weakness he sees and comforts;wickedness he cannot see. 

When he came in I was busy whittling my axe-helve, it being my pleasureat that moment to make long, thin, curly shavings so light that many ofthem were caught on the hearth and bowled by the draught straight tofiery destruction. 

There is a noisy zest about the Scotch preacher: he comes in "stomping"as we say, he must clear his throat, he must strike his hands together;he even seems noisy when he unwinds the thick red tippet which he wearswound many times around his neck. It takes him a long time to unwind it, and he accomplishes the task with many slow gyrations of his enormousrough head. When he sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair, spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight as a post, and blows hisnose with a noise like the falling of a tree. 

His interest in everything is prodigious. When he saw what I was doinghe launched at once upon an account of the methods of axe-helving, ancient and modern, with true incidents of his childhood. 

"Man, " he exclaimed, "you've clean forgotten one of the preenciplerefinements of the art. When you chop, which hand do you hold down?"

At the moment, I couldn't have told "to save my life, so we both got upon our feet and tried. 

"It's the right hand down, " I decided; "that's natural to me. "

"You're a normal right-handed chopper, then, " said the Scotch preacher, "as I was thinking. Now let me instruct you in the art. Beingright-handed, your helve must bow out--so. No first-class chopper uses astraight handle. "

He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mysteries of the bowed handle, and as I listened I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task Thiswas a final perfection to be accomplished, the finality of technique!

So we sat with our heads together talking helves and axes, axes withsingle blades and axes with double blades, and hand axes and greatchoppers' axes, and the science of felling trees, with the truephilosophy of the last chip, and arguments as to the best procedure whena log begins to "pinch"--until a listener would have thought that theart of the chopper included the whole philosophy of existence--as indeedit does, if you look at it in that way. Finally I rushed out and broughtin my old axe-handle, and we set upon it like true artists, withcritical proscription for being a trivial product of machinery. 

"Man, " exclaimed the preacher, "it has no character. Now your helvehere, being the vision of your brain and work of your hands, willinterpret the thought of your heart. "

Before the Scotch preacher had finished his disquisition upon the art ofhelve-making and its relations with all other arts, I felt like Pearydiscovering the Pole. 

In the midst of the discourse, while I was soaring high, the Scotchpreacher suddenly stopped, sat up, and struck his knee with a tremendousresounding smack. 

"Spoons!" he exclaimed. 

Harriet and I stopped and looked at him in astonishment. 

"Spoons, " repeated Harriet. 

"Spoons, " said the Scotch preacher. "I've not once thought of my errand;and my wife told me to come straight home. I'm more thoughtless everyday!"

Then he turned to Harriet:

"I've been sent to borrow some spoons, " he said. 

"Spoons!" exclaimed Harriet. 

"Spoons, " answered the Scotch preacher. "We've invited friends fordinner to-morrow, and we must have spoons. "

"But why--how--I thought--" began Harriet, still in astonishment. 

The Scotch preacher squared around toward her and cleared his throat. 

"It's the baptisms, " he said: "when a baby is brought for baptism, ofcourse it must have a baptismal gift. What is the best gift for a baby?A spoon. So we present it with a spoon. To-day we discovered we had onlythree spoons left, and company coming. Man, 'tis a proleeficneighbourhood. "

[Illustration: "LET MY AXE FALL"]

He heaved a great sigh. 

Harriet rushed out and made up a package. When she came in I thought itseemed suspiciously large for spoons, but the Scotch preacher havingagain launched into the lore of the chopper, took it without at firstperceiving anything strange. Five minutes after we had closed the doorupon him he suddenly returned holding up the package. 

"This is an uncommonly heavy package, " he remarked; "did I saytable-spoons?"

"Go on!" commanded Harriet; "your wife will understand. "

"All right--good-bye again, " and his sturdy figure soon disappeared inthe dark. 

"The impractical man!" exclaimed Harriet. "People impose on him. "

"What was in that package, Harriet?"

"Oh, I put in a few jars of jelly and a cake of honey. "

After a moment Harriet looked up from her work. 

"Do you know the greatest sorrow of the Scotch preacher and his wife?"

"What is it?" I asked. 

"They have no chick nor child of their own, " said Harriet. 

It is prodigious, the amount of work required to make a goodaxe-helve--I mean to make it according to one's standard. I had times ofhumorous discouragement and times of high elation when it seemed to me Icould not work fast enough. Weeks passed when I did not touch the helvebut left it standing quietly in the corner. Once or twice I took it outand walked about with it as a sort of cane, much to the secretamusement, I think, of Harriet. At times Harriet takes a really wickeddelight in her superiority. 

Early one morning in March the dawn came with a roaring wind, sleetysnow drove down over the hill, the house creaked and complained in everyclapboard. A blind of one of the upper windows, wrenched loose from itsfastenings, was driven shut with such force that it broke a window pane. When I rushed up to discover the meaning of the clatter and to repairthe damage, I found the floor covered with peculiar long fragments ofglass--the pane having been broken inward from the centre. 

"Just what I have wanted, " I said to myself. 

I selected a few of the best pieces and so eager was I to try them thatI got out my axe-helve before breakfast and sat scratching away whenHarriet came down. 

Nothing equals a bit of broken glass for putting on the final perfecttouch to a work of art like an axe-helve. Nothing will so beautifullyand delicately trim out the curves of the throat or give a smoother turnto the waist. So with care and an indescribable affection, I added thefinal touches, trimming the helve until it exactly fitted my hand. Oftenand often I tried it in pantomime, swinging nobly in the centre of thesitting-room (avoiding the lamp), attentive to the feel of my hand as itran along the helve. I rubbed it down with fine sandpaper until itfairly shone with whiteness. Then I borrowed a red flannel cloth ofHarriet and having added a few drops--not too much--of boiled oil, Irubbed the helve for all I was worth. This I continued for upward of anhour. At that time the axe-helve had taken on a yellowish shade, veryclear and beautiful. 

I do not think I could have been prouder if I had carved a statue orbuilt a parthenon. I was consumed with vanity; but I set the new helvein the corner with the appearance of utter unconcern. 

"There, " I remarked, "it's finished. "

I watched Harriet out of the corner of my eye: she made as if to speakand then held silent. 

That evening friend Horace came in. I was glad to see him. Horace is orwas a famous chopper. I placed him at the fireplace where his eye, sooner or later, must fall upon my axe-helve. Oh, I worked out mydesigns! Presently he saw the helve, picked it up at once and turned itover in his hands. I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense ofself-consciousness. I know how a poet must feel at hearing his firstpoem read aloud by some other person who does not know its authorship. Isuffer and thrill with the novelist who sees a stranger purchase hisbook in a book-shop. I felt as though I stood that moment before theGreat Judge. 

Horace "hefted" it and balanced it, and squinted along it; he rubbed itwith his thumb, he rested one end of it on the floor and sprung itroughly. 

"David, " he said severely, "where did you git this?"

Once when I was a boy I came home with my hair wet. My father asked:

"David, have you been swimming?"

I had exactly the same feeling when Horace asked his question. Now I am, generally speaking, a truthful man. I have written a good deal about theimmorality, the unwisdom, the short-sightedness, the sinful wastefulnessof a lie. But at that moment, if Harriet had not been present--and thatillustrates one of the purposes of society, to bolster up a man'smorals--I should have evolved as large and perfect a prevarication as itlay within me to do--cheerfully. But I felt Harriet's moral eye upon me:I was a coward as well as a sinner. I faltered so long that Horacefinally looked around at me. 

Horace has no poetry in his soul, neither does he understand thephilosophy of imperfection nor the art of irregularity. 

It is a tender shoot, easily blasted by cold winds, the creativeinstinct: but persistent. It has many adventitious buds. A late frostdestroying the freshness of its early verdure, may be the means of aricher growth in later and more favourable days. 

 * * * * *

For a week I left my helve standing there in the corner. I did not evenlook at it. I was slain. I even thought of getting up in the night andputting the helve on the coals--secretly. Then, suddenly, one morning, Itook it up not at all tenderly, indeed with a humorous appreciation ofmy own absurdities, and carried it out into the yard. An axe-helve isnot a mere ornament but a thing of sober purpose. The test, after all, of axe-helves is not sublime perfection, but service. We may easily findflaws in the verse of the master--how far the rhythm fails of the finalperfect music, how often uncertain the rhyme--but it bears within it, hidden yet evident, that certain incalculable fire which kindles andwill continue to kindle the souls of men. The final test is not theperfection of precedent, not regularity, but life, spirit. 

It was one of those perfect, sunny, calm mornings that sometimes come inearly April: the zest of winter yet in the air, but a promise of summer. 

I built a fire of oak chips in the middle of the yard, between two flatstones. I brought out my old axe, and when the fire had burned downsomewhat, leaving a foundation of hot coals, I thrust the eye of the axeinto the fire. The blade rested on one of the flat stones, and I kept itcovered with wet rags in order that it might not heat sufficiently todestroy the temper of the steel. Harriet's old gray hen, a garrulousfowl, came and stood on one leg and looked at me first with one eye andthen with the other. She asked innumerable impertinent questions and wasgenerally disagreeable. 

"I am sorry, madam, " I said finally, "but I have grown adamant tocriticism. I have done my work as well as it lies in me to do it. It isthe part of sanity to throw it aside without compunction. A work mustprove itself. Shoo!"

I said this with such conclusiveness and vigour that the critical oldhen departed hastily with ruffled feathers. 

So I sat there in the glorious perfection of the forenoon, the great dayopen around me, a few small clouds abroad in the highest sky, and allthe earth radiant with sunshine. The last snow of winter was gone, thesap ran in the trees, the cows fed further afield. 

When the eye of the axe was sufficiently expanded by the heat I drew itquickly from the fire and drove home the helve which I had alreadywhittled down to the exact size. I had a hickory wedge prepared, and itwas the work of ten seconds to drive it into the cleft at the lower endof the helve until the eye of the axe was completely and perfectlyfilled. Upon cooling the steel shrunk upon the wood, clasping it withsuch firmness that nothing short of fire could ever dislodge it. Then, carefully, with knife and sandpaper I polished off the wood around thesteel of the axe until I had made as good a job of it as lay within mypower. 

So I carried the axe to my log-pile. I swung it above my head and thefeel of it was good in my hands. The blade struck deep into the oakwood. And I said to myself with satisfaction:

"It serves the purpose. "

VI

THE MARSH DITCH

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and lifeemits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-smelling herbs--is moreelastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your Success. "

In all the days of my life I have never been so well content as I amthis spring. Last summer I thought I was happy, the fall gave me afinality of satisfaction, the winter imparted perspective, but springconveys a wholly new sense of life, a quickening the like of which Inever before experienced. It seems to me that everything in the world ismore interesting, more vital, more significant. I feel like "wavingaside all roofs, " in the way of Le Sage's Asmodeus. 

I even cease to fear Mrs. Horace, who is quite the most formidableperson in this neighbourhood. She is so avaricious in the saving ofsouls--and so covetous of mine, which I wish especially to retain. WhenI see her coming across the hill I feel like running and hiding, and ifI were as bold as a boy, I should do it, but being a grown-up coward Iremain and dissemble. 

She came over this morning. When I beheld her afar off, I drew a longbreath: "One thousand, " I quoted to myself, "shall flee at the rebuke ofone. "

In calmness I waited. She came with colours flying and hurled herbiblical lance. When I withstood the shock with unexpected jauntiness, for I usually fall dead at once, she looked at me with severity andsaid:

"Mr. Grayson, you are a materialist. "

"You have shot me with a name, " I replied. "I am unhurt. "

It would be impossible to slay me on a day like this. On a day likethis I am immortal. 

It comes to me as the wonder of wonders, these spring days, how surelyeverything, spiritual as well as material, proceeds out of the earth. Ihave times of sheer Paganism when I could bow and touch my face to thewarm bare soil. We are so often ashamed of the Earth--the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness of it. To us in our fineraiment and soft manners, it seems indelicate. Instead of seeking thatassociation with the earth which is the renewal of life, we deviseourselves distant palaces and seek strange pleasures. How often andsadly we repeat the life story of the yellow dodder of the moist lanesof my lower farm. It springs up fresh and clean from the earth itself, and spreads its clinging viny stems over the hospitable wild balsam andgolden rod. In a week's time, having reached the warm sunshine of theupper air, it forgets its humble beginnings. Its roots wither swiftlyand die out, but the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish andspread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but bystrangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder--rootless, leafless, parasitic--reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off andsmothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishesand then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be likethat: so much of our civilization is like that. Men and women thereare--the pity of it--who, eating plentifully, have never themselvestaken a mouthful from the earth. They have never known a moment's reallife of their own. Lying up to the sun in warmth and comfort--butleafless--they do not think of the hosts under them, smothered, strangled, starved. They take _nothing_ at first hand. They experiencedescribed emotion, and think prepared thoughts. They live not in life, but in printed reports of life. They gather the odour of odours, not theodour itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A poor, sad, second-rateexistence!

Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail, everyone, until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil!

My wild plum trees grow in the coarse earth, among excrementitiousmould, a physical life which finally blossoms and exhales its perfectodour: which ultimately bears the seed of its immortality. 

Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation ofwork: and the seed of human immortality is borne secretly within thecoarse and mortal husk. So many of us crave the odour withoutcultivating the earthly growth from which it proceeds: so many, wastingmortality, expect immortality!

----"Why, " asks Charles Baxter, "do you always put the end of yourstories first?"

"You may be thankful, " I replied, "that I do not make my remarks allendings. Endings are so much more interesting than beginnings. "

Without looking up from the buggy he was mending, Charles Baxterintimated that my way had at least one advantage: one always knew, hesaid, that I really had an end in view--and hope deferred, he said----

----How surely, soundly, deeply, the physical underlies the spiritual. This morning I was up and out at half-past four, as perfect a morning asI ever saw: mists yet huddled in the low spots, the sun coming up overthe hill, and all the earth fresh with moisture, sweet with goododours, and musical with early bird-notes. 

It is the time of the spring just after the last seeding and before theearly haying: a catch-breath in the farmer's year. I have been utilisingit in digging a drainage ditch at the lower end of my farm. A spot ofmarsh grass and blue flags occupies nearly half an acre of good land andI have been planning ever since I bought the place to open a drain fromits lower edge to the creek, supplementing it in the field above, ifnecessary, with submerged tiling. I surveyed it carefully several weeksago and drew plans and contours of the work as though it were aninter-oceanic canal. I find it a real delight to work out in the earthitself the details of the drawing. 

This morning, after hastening with the chores, I took my bag and myspade on my shoulder and set off (in rubber boots) for the ditch. My waylay along the margin of my cornfield in the deep grass. On my right as Iwalked was the old rail fence full of thrifty young hickory and cherrytrees with here and there a clump of blackberry bushes. The treesbeyond the fence cut off the sunrise so that I walked in the cool broadshadows. On my left stretched the cornfield of my planting, the youngcorn well up, very attractive and hopeful, my really frightful scarecrowstanding guard on the knoll, a wisp of straw sticking up through a holein his hat and his crooked thumbs turned down--"No mercy. "

"Surely no corn ever before grew like this, " I said to myself. "To-morrow I must begin cultivating again. "

So I looked up and about me--not to miss anything of the morning--and Idrew in a good big breath and I thought the world had never been so opento my senses. 

I wonder why it is that the sense of smell is so commonlyunder-regarded. To me it is the source of some of my greatest pleasures. No one of the senses is more often allied with robustity of physicalhealth. A man who smells acutely may be set down as enjoying that whichis normal, plain, wholesome. He does not require seasoning: the ordinaryearth is good enough for him. He is likely to be sane--which meanssound, healthy--in his outlook upon life. 

Of all hours of the day there is none like the early morning fordownright good odours--the morning before eating. Fresh from sleep andunclogged with food a man's senses cut like knives. The whole worldcomes in upon him. A still morning is best, for the mists and themoisture seem to retain the odours which they have distilled through thenight. Upon a breezy morning one is likely to get a single predominantodour as of clover when the wind blows across a hay field or of appleblossoms when the wind comes through the orchard, but upon a perfectlystill morning, it is wonderful how the odours arrange themselves inupright strata, so that one walking passes through them as from room toroom in a marvellous temple of fragrance, (I should have said, I think, if I had not been on my way to dig a ditch, that it was like turning theleaves of some delicate volume of lyrics!)

So it was this morning. As I walked along the margin of my field I wasconscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool, heavy aroma which one associates with the night: as of moist woods andearth mould. The penetrating scent of the night remains long after thesights and sounds of it have disappeared. In sunny spots I had thefragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity--a warm, generous odour ofdaylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting insharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almosttropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, thethin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags andthe frogs. 

How few of us really use our senses! I mean give ourselves fully at anytime to the occupation of the senses. We do not expect to understand atreatise on Economics without applying our minds to it, nor can wereally smell or hear or see or feel without every faculty alert. Throughsheer indolence we miss half the joy of the world!

Often as I work I stop to see: really see: see everything, or to listen, and it is the wonder of wonders, how much there is in this old worldwhich we never dreamed of, how many beautiful, curious, interestingsights and sounds there are which ordinarily make no impression upon ourclogged, overfed and preoccupied minds. I have also had the feeling--itmay be unscientific but it is comforting--that any man might see like anIndian or smell like a hound if he gave to the senses the brains whichthe Indian and the hound apply to them. And I'm pretty sure about theIndian! It is marvellous what a man can do when he puts his entire mindupon one faculty and bears down hard. 

So I walked this morning, not hearing nor seeing, but smelling. Withoutdesiring to stir up strife among the peaceful senses, there is thisfurther marvel of the sense of smell. No other possesses such anafter-call. Sight preserves pictures: the complete view of the aspect ofobjects, but it is photographic and external. Hearing deals in echoes, but the sense of smell, while saving no vision of a place or a person, will re-create in a way almost miraculous the inner _emotion_ of aparticular time or place. I know of nothing that will so "create anappetite under the ribs of death. "

Only a short time ago I passed an open doorway in the town. I was busywith errands, my mind fully engaged, but suddenly I caught an odour fromsomewhere within the building I was passing. I stopped! It was as if inthat moment I lost twenty years of my life: I was a boy again, livingand feeling a particular instant at the time of my father's death. Everyemotion of that occasion, not recalled in years, returned to me sharplyand clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was apeculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression ofspace--can I describe it?--the utter bigness of the world and thealoofness of myself, a little boy, within it--now that my father wasgone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was aninexpressible cold terror--that anywhere I might go in the world, Ishould still be alone!

And there I stood, a man grown, shaking in the sunshine with that oldboyish emotion brought back to me by an odour! Often and often have Iknown this strange rekindling of dead fires. And I have thought how, ifour senses were really perfect, we might lose nothing, out of our lives:neither sights, nor sounds, nor emotions: a sort of mortal immortality. Was not Shakespeare great because he lost less of the savings of hissenses than other men? What a wonderful seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, he must have been--and how, all the time, his mind must haveplayed upon the gatherings of his senses! All scenes, all men, the veryturn of a head, the exact sound of a voice, the taste of food, the feelof the world--all the emotions of his life must he have had there beforehim as he wrote, his great mind playing upon them, reconstructing, re-creating and putting them down hot upon his pages. There is nothingstrange about great men; they are like us, only deeper, higher, broader:they think as we do, but with more intensity: they suffer as we do, morekeenly: they love as we do, more tenderly. 

I may be over-glorifying the sense of smell, but it is only because Iwalked this morning in a world of odours. The greatest of the senses, ofcourse, is not smell or hearing, but sight. What would not any manexchange for that: for the faces one loves, for the scenes one holdsmost dear, for all that is beautiful and changeable and beyonddescription? The Scotch Preacher says that the saddest lines in allliterature are those of Milton, writing of his blindness. 

"Seasons return; but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. "

--I have wandered a long way from ditch-digging, but not wholly withoutintention. Sooner or later I try to get back into the main road. I throwdown my spade in the wet trampled grass at the edge of the ditch. I takeoff my coat and hang it over a limb of the little hawthorn tree. I putmy bag near it. I roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt: I give my hata twirl; I'm ready for work. 

--The senses are the tools by which we lay hold upon the world: they arethe implements of consciousness and growth. So long as they are usedupon the good earth--used to wholesome weariness--they remain healthy, they yield enjoyment, they nourish growth; but let them once be removedfrom their natural employment and they turn and feed upon themselves, they seek the stimulation of luxury, they wallow in their owncorruption, and finally, worn out, perish from off the earth which theyhave not appreciated. Vice is ever the senses gone astray. 

--So I dug. There is something fine in hard physical labour, straightahead: no brain used, just muscles. I stood ankle-deep in the coolwater: every spadeful came out with a smack, and as I turned it over atthe edge of the ditch small turgid rivulets coursed back again. I didnot think of anything in particular. I dug. A peculiar joy attends thevery pull of the muscles. I drove the spade home with one foot, then Ibent and lifted and turned with a sort of physical satisfactiondifficult to describe. At first I had the cool of the morning, but byseven o'clock the day was hot enough! I opened the breast of my shirt, gave my sleeves another roll, and went at it again for half an hour, until I dripped with perspiration. 

"I will knock off, " I said, so I used my spade as a ladder and climbedout of the ditch. Being very thirsty, I walked down through the marshyvalley to the clump of alders which grows along the creek. I followed acow-path through the thicket and came to the creek side, where I knelton a log and took a good long drink. Then I soused my head in the coolstream, dashed the water upon my arms and came up dripping and gasping!Oh, but it was fine!

So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where I sat down comfortably andstretched my legs. There is a poem in stretched legs--after harddigging--but I can't write it, though I can feel it! I got my bag andtook out a half loaf of Harriet's bread. Breaking off big crude pieces, I ate it there in the shade. How rarely we taste the real taste ofbread! We disguise it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk orfruit. We even soak it with gravy (here in the country where we aren'tat all polite--but very comfortable), so that we never get the downrightdelicious taste of the bread itself. I was hungry this morning and I atemy half loaf to the last crumb--and wanted more. Then I lay down for amoment in the shade and looked up into the sky through the thin outerbranches of the hawthorn. A turkey buzzard was lazily circlingcloud-high above me: a frog boomed intermittently from the little marsh, and there were bees at work in the blossoms. 

--I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had wornoff. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes asort of machine--unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work, though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in theconsciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for longafterward every separate step in a task. 

It is curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. Ioften work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, savethat connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself--downwith the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it--and repeat. Andyet sometimes--mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired--I willsuddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me--a sense of itsbeauty and its meanings--giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that isnear complete content--

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy merethought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! Forhappiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She lovessweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces butlurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks:she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look upsuddenly from hard work you will see her, but if you look too long shefades sorrowfully away. 

--Down toward the town there is a little factory for barrel hoops andstaves. It has one of the most musical whistles I ever heard in my life. It toots at exactly twelve o'clock: blessed sound! The last half-hour atditch-digging is a hard, slow pull. I'm warm and tired, but I stick downto it and wait with straining ear for the music. At the very first note, of that whistle I drop my spade. I will even empty out a load of dirthalf way up rather than expend another ounce of energy; and I spring outof the ditch and start for home with a single desire in my heart--orpossibly lower down. And Harriet, standing in the doorway, seems to mea sort of angel--a culinary angel!

Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and bakedpotatoes and home-made bread--there may be--

VII

AN ARGUMENT WITH A MILLIONNAIRE

 "Let the mighty and great Roll in splendour and state, I envy them not, I declare it. I eat my own lamb, My own chicken and ham, I shear my own sheep and wear it. 

 I have lawns, I have bowers, I have fruits, I have flowers. The lark is my morning charmer; So you jolly dogs now, Here's God bless the plow-- Long life and content to the farmer. "

----_Rhyme on an old pitcher of English pottery_. 

I have been hearing of John Starkweather ever since I came here. He is amost important personage in this community. He is rich. Horaceespecially loved to talk about him. Give Horace half a chance, whetherthe subject be pigs or churches, and he will break in somewhere with theremark: "As I was saying to Mr. Starkweather--" or, "Mr. Starkweathersays to me--" How we love to shine by reflected glory! Even Harriet hasnot gone unscathed; she, too, has been affected by the bacillus ofadmiration. She has wanted to know several times if I saw JohnStarkweather drive by: "the finest span of horses in this country, " shesays, and "_did_ you see his daughter?" Much other informationconcerning the Starkweather household, culinary and otherwise, iscurrent among our hills. We know accurately the number of Mr. Starkweather's bedrooms, we can tell how much coal he uses in winter andhow many tons of ice in summer, and upon such important premises weargue his riches. 

Several times I have passed John Starkweather's home. It lies between myfarm and the town, though not on the direct road, and it is reallybeautiful with the groomed and guided beauty possible to wealth. Astately old house with a huge end chimney of red brick stands withdignity well back from the road; round about lie pleasant lawns thatonce were cornfields: and there are drives and walks and exotic shrubs. At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to understand why Ishould also enjoy Starkweather's groomed surroundings. But it came to methat after all, much as we may love wildness, we are not wild, nor ourworks. What more artificial than a house, or a barn, or a fence? And thegreater and more formal the house, the more formal indeed must be thenearer natural environments. Perhaps the hand of man might well havebeen less evident in developing the surroundings of the Starkweatherhome--for art, dealing with nature, is so often too accomplished!

But I enjoy the Starkweather place and as I look in from the road, Isometimes think to myself with satisfaction: "Here is this rich man whohas paid his thousands to make the beauty which I pass and take fornothing--and having taken, leave as much behind. " And I wonder sometimeswhether he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than I, who walk theroads outside. Anyway, I am grateful to him for using his riches so muchto my advantage. 

On fine mornings John Starkweather sometimes comes out in his slippers, bare-headed, his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and walks slowlyaround his garden. Charles Baxter says that on these occasions he isasking his gardener the names of the vegetables. However that may be, hehas seemed to our community the very incarnation of contentment andprosperity--his position the acme of desirability. 

What was my astonishment, then, the other morning to see JohnStarkweather coming down the pasture lane through my farm. I knew himafar off, though I had never met him. May I express the inexpressiblewhen I say he had a rich look; he walked rich, there was richness in theconfident crook of his elbow, and in the positive twitch of the stick hecarried: a man accustomed to having doors opened before he knocked. Istood there a moment and looked up the hill at him, and I felt thatprofound curiosity which every one of us feels every day of his life toknow something of the inner impulses which stir his nearest neighbour. Ishould have liked to know John Starkweather; but I thought to myself asI have thought so many times how surely one comes finally to imitate hissurroundings. A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the sawdust onhis coat is not the most distinctive insignia of the carpenter; the poetwrites his truest lines upon his own countenance. People passing in myroad take me to be a part of this natural scene. I suppose I seem tothem as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like thegrass and leaves as to be invisible. We all come to be marked upon bynature and dismissed--how carelessly!--as genera or species. And is itnot the primal struggle of man to escape classification, to form newdifferentiations?

Sometimes--I confess it--when I see one passing in my road, I feel likehailing him and saying:

"Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, am a person; I am different andcurious. I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts of people; ifyou are not interested in me, at least I am intensely interested in you. Come over now and let's talk!"

So we are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfswhich separate us even from our nearest friends!

Once or twice this feeling has been so real to me that I've been nearto the point of hailing utter strangers--only to be instantly overcomewith a sense of the humorous absurdity of such an enterprise. So I laughit off and I say to myself:

"Steady now: the man is going to town to sell a pig; he is coming backwith ten pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can of coffee and somenew blades for his mowing machine. He hasn't time for talk"--and so Icome down with a bump to my digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or whateverit is. 

----Here I've left John Starkweather in my pasture while I remark tothe extent of a page or two that I didn't expect him to see me when hewent by. 

I assumed that he was out for a walk, perhaps to enliven a worn appetite(do you know, confidentially, I've had some pleasure in times past inreflecting upon the jaded appetites of millionnaires!), and that hewould pass out by my lane to the country road; but instead of that, whatshould he do but climb the yard fence and walk over toward the barnwhere I was at work. 

Perhaps I was not consumed with excitement: here was fresh adventure!

"A farmer, " I said to myself with exultation, "has only to wait longenough and all the world comes his way. "

I had just begun to grease my farm wagon and was experiencing somedifficulty in lifting and steadying the heavy rear axle while I took offthe wheel. I kept busily at work, pretending (such is the perversity ofthe human mind) that I did not see Mr. Starkweather. He stood for amoment watching me; then he said:

"Good morning, sir. "

I looked up and said:

"Oh, good morning!"

"Nice little farm you have here. "

"It's enough for me, " I replied. I did not especially like the "little. "One is human. 

Then I had an absurd inspiration: he stood there so trim and jaunty andprosperous. So rich! I had a good look at him. He was dressed in awoollen jacket coat, knee-trousers and leggins; on his head he wore ajaunty, cocky little Scotch cap; a man, I should judge, about fiftyyears old, well-fed and hearty in appearance, with grayish hair and agood-humoured eye. I acted on my inspiration:

"You've arrived, " I said, "at the psychological moment. "

"How's that?"

"Take hold here and help me lift this axle and steady it. I'm having ahard time of it. "

The look of astonishment in his countenance was beautiful to see. 

For a moment failure stared me in the face. His expression said withemphasis: "Perhaps you don't know who I am. " But I looked at him withthe greatest good feeling and my expression said, or I meant it to say:"To be sure I don't: and what difference does it make, anyway!"

"You take hold there, " I said, without waiting for him to catch hisbreath, "and I'll get hold here. Together we can easily get the wheeloff. "

Without a word he set his cane against the barn and bent his back, upcame the axle and I propped it with a board. 

"Now, " I said, "you hang on there and steady it while I get the wheeloff"--though, indeed, it didn't really need much steadying. 

As I straightened up, whom should I see but Harriet standing transfixedin the pathway half way down to the barn, transfixed with horror. Shehad recognised John Starkweather and had heard at least part of what Isaid to him, and the vision of that important man bending his back tohelp lift the axle of my old wagon was too terrible! She caught my eyeand pointed and mouthed. When I smiled and nodded, John Starkweatherstraightened up and looked around. 

"Don't, on your life, " I warned, "let go of that axle. "

He held on and Harriet turned and retreated ingloriously. JohnStarkweather's face was a study!

"Did you ever grease a wagon?" I asked him genially. 

"Never, " he said. 

"There's more of an art in it than you think, " I said, and as I worked Italked to him of the lore of axle-grease and showed him exactly how toput it on--neither too much nor too little, and so that it woulddistribute itself evenly when the wheel was replaced. 

"There's a right way of doing everything, " I observed. 

"That's so, " said John Starkweather: "if I could only get workmen thatbelieved it. "

By that time I could see that he was beginning to be interested. I putback the wheel, gave it a light turn and screwed on the nut. He helpedme with the other end of the axle with all good humour. 

"Perhaps, " I said, as engagingly as I knew how, "you'd like to try theart yourself? You take the grease this time and I'll steady the wagon. "

"All right!" he said, laughing, "I'm in for anything. "

He took the grease box and the paddle--less gingerly than I thought hewould. 

"Is that right?" he demanded, and so he put on the grease. And oh, itwas good to see Harriet in the doorway!

"Steady there, " I said, "not so much at the end: now put the box down onthe reach. "

And so together we greased the wagon, talking all the time in thefriendliest way. I actually believe that he was having a pretty goodtime. At least it had the virtue of unexpectedness. He wasn't bored!

When he had finished we both straightened our backs and looked at eachother. There was a twinkle in his eye: then we both laughed. "He's allright, " I said to myself. I held up my hands, then he held up his: itwas hardly necessary to prove that wagon-greasing was not a delicateoperation. 

"It's a good wholesome sign, " I said, "but it'll come off. Do you happento remember a story of Tolstoi's called Ivan the Fool'?"

("What is a farmer doing quoting Tolstoi!" remarked hiscountenance--though he said not a word. )

"In the kingdom of Ivan, you remember, " I said, "it was the rule thatwhoever had hard places on his hands came to table, but whoever had notmust eat what the others left. "

Thus I led him up to the back steps and poured him a basin of hotwater--which I brought myself from the kitchen, Harriet havingmarvellously and completely disappeared. We both washed our hands, talking with great good humour. 

When we had finished I said:

"Sit down, friend, if you've time, and let's talk. "

So he sat down on one of the logs of my woodpile: a solid sort of man, rather warm after his recent activities. He looked me over with someinterest and, I thought, friendliness. 

"Why does a man like you, " he asked finally, "waste himself on a littlefarm back here in the country?"

For a single instant I came nearer to being angry than I have been for along time. _Waste_ myself! So we are judged without knowledge. I had asudden impulse to demolish him (if I could) with the nearest sarcasms Icould lay hand to. He was so sure of himself! "Oh well, " I thought, withvainglorious superiority, "he doesn't know, " So I said:

"What would you have me be--a millionnaire?"

He smiled, but with a sort of sincerity. 

"You might be, " he said: "who can tell!"

I laughed outright: the humour of it struck me as delicious. Here I hadbeen, ever since I first heard of John Starkweather, rather gloatingover him as a poor suffering millionnaire (of course millionnaires _are_unhappy), and there he sat, ruddy of face and hearty of body, pitying_me_ for a poor unfortunate farmer back here in the country! Curious, this human nature of ours, isn't it? But how infinitely beguiling!

So I sat down beside Mr. Starkweather on the log and crossed my legs. Ifelt as though I had set foot in a new country. 

"Would you really advise me, " I asked, "to start in to be amillionnaire?"

He chuckled:

"Well, that's one way of putting it. Hitch your wagon to a star; butbegin by making a few dollars more a year than you spend. When Ibegan----" he stopped short with an amused smile, remembering that I didnot know who he was. 

"Of course, " I said, "I understand that. "

"A man must begin small"--he was on pleasant ground--"and anywhere helikes, a few dollars here, a few there. He must work hard, he must save, he must be both bold and cautious. I know a man who began when he wasabout your age with total assets of ten dollars and a good digestion. He's now considered a fairly wealthy man. He has a home in the city, aplace in the country, and he goes to Europe when he likes. He has soarranged his affairs that young men do most of the work and he draws thedividends--and all in a little more than twenty years. I made everysingle cent--but as I said, it's a penny business to start with. Thepoint is, I like to see young men ambitious. "

[Illustration: "What would you have me be--a millionaire?"]

"Ambitious, " I asked, "for what?"

"Why, to rise in the world; to get ahead. "

"I know you'll pardon me, " I said, "for appearing to cross-examine you, but I'm tremendously interested in these things. What do you mean byrising? And who am I to get ahead of?"

He looked at me in astonishment, and with evident impatience at myconsummate stupidity. 

"I am serious, " I said. "I really want to make the best I can of mylife. It's the only one I've got. "

"See here, " he said: "let us say you clear up five hundred a year fromthis farm----"

"You exaggerate--" I interrupted. 

"Do I?" he laughed; "that makes my case all the better. Now, isn't itpossible to rise from that? Couldn't you make a thousand or fivethousand or even fifty thousand a year?"

It seems an unanswerable argument: fifty thousand dollars!

"I suppose I might, " I said, "but do you think I'd be any better off orhappier with fifty thousand a year than I am now? You see, I like allthese surroundings better than any other place I ever knew. That oldgreen hill over there with the oak on it is an intimate friend of mine. I have a good cornfield in which every year I work miracles. I've a cowand a horse, and a few pigs. I have a comfortable home. My appetite isperfect, and I have plenty of food to gratify it. I sleep every nightlike a boy, for I haven't a trouble in this world to disturb me. I enjoythe mornings here in the country: and the evenings are pleasant. Some ofmy neighbours have come to be my good friends. I like them and I ampretty sure they like me. Inside the house there I have the best booksever written and I have time in the evenings to read them--I mean_really_ read them. Now the question is, would I be any better off, orany happier, if I had fifty thousand a year?"

John Starkweather laughed. 

"Well, sir, " he said, "I see I've made the acquaintance of aphilosopher. "

"Let us say, " I continued, "that you are willing to invest twenty yearsof your life in a million dollars. " ("Merely an illustration, " saidJohn Starkweather. ) "You have it where you can put it in the bank andtake it out again, or you can give it form in houses, yachts, and otherthings. Now twenty years of my life--to me--is worth more than a milliondollars. I simply can't afford to sell it for that. I prefer to investit, as somebody or other has said, unearned in life. I've always had aliking for intangible properties. "

"See here, " said John Starkweather, "you are taking a narrow view oflife. You are making your own pleasure the only standard. Shouldn't aman make the most of the talents given him? Hasn't he a duty tosociety?"

"Now you are shifting your ground, " I said, "from the question ofpersonal satisfaction to that of duty. That concerns me, too. Let me askyou: Isn't it important to society that this piece of earth be plowedand cultivated?"

"Yes, but----"

"Isn't it honest and useful work?"

"Of course. "

"Isn't it important that it shall not only be done, but well done?"

"Certainly. "

"It takes all there is in a good man, " I said, "to be a good farmer. "

"But the point is, " he argued, "might not the same faculties applied toother things yield better and bigger results?"

"That is a problem, of course, " I said. "I tried money-making once--in acity--and I was unsuccessful and unhappy; here I am both successful andhappy. I suppose I was one of the young men who did the work while somemillionnaire drew the dividends. " (I was cutting close, and I didn'tventure to look at him). "No doubt he had his houses and yachts and wentto Europe when he liked. I know I lived upstairs--back--where therewasn't a tree to be seen, or a spear of green grass, or a hill, or abrook: only smoke and chimneys and littered roofs. Lord be thanked formy escape! Sometimes I think that Success has formed a silent conspiracyagainst Youth. Success holds up a single glittering apple and bids Youthstrip and run for it; and Youth runs and Success still holds the apple. "

John Starkweather said nothing. 

"Yes, " I said, "there are duties. We realise, we farmers, that we mustproduce more than we ourselves can eat or wear or burn. We realise thatwe are the foundation: we connect human life with the earth. We dig andplant and produce, and having eaten at the first table ourselves, wepass what is left to the bankers and millionnaires. Did you ever think, stranger, that most of the wars of the world have been fought for thecontrol of this farmer's second table? Have you thought that the surplusof wheat and corn and cotton is what the railroads are struggling tocarry? Upon our surplus run all the factories and mills; a little of itgathered in cash makes a millionnaire. But we farmers, we sit backcomfortably after dinner, and joke with our wives and play with ourbabies, and let all the rest of you fight for the crumbs that fall fromour abundant tables. If once we really cared and got up and shookourselves, and said to the maid: 'Here, child, don't waste the crusts:gather 'em up and to-morrow we'll have a cottage pudding, ' where in theworld would all the millionnaires be?"

Oh, I tell you, I waxed eloquent. I couldn't let John Starkweather, orany other man, get away with the conviction that a millionnaire isbetter than a farmer. "Moreover, " I said, "think of the position of themillionnaire. He spends his time playing not with life, but with thesymbols of life, whether cash or houses. Any day the symbols may change;a little war may happen along, there may be a defective flue or awestern breeze, or even a panic because the farmers aren't scattering asmany crumbs as usual (they call it crop failure, but I've noticed thatthe farmers still continue to have plenty to eat) and then what happensto your millionnaire? Not knowing how to produce anything himself, hewould starve to death if there were not always, somewhere, a farmer totake him up to the table. "

"You're making a strong case, " laughed John Starkweather. 

"Strong!" I said. "It is simply wonderful what a leverage upon society afew acres of land, a cow, a pig or two, and a span of horses gives aman. I'm ridiculously independent. I'd be the hardest sort of a man todislodge or crush. I tell you, my friend, a farmer is like an oak, hisroots strike deep in the soil, he draws a sufficiency of food from theearth itself, he breathes the free air around him, his thirst isquenched by heaven itself--and there's no tax on sunshine. "

I paused for very lack of breath. John Starkweather was laughing. 

"When you commiserate me, therefore" ("I'm sure I shall never do itagain, " said John Starkweather)--"when you commiserate me, therefore, and advise me to rise, you must give me really good reasons for changingmy occupation and becoming a millionnaire. You must prove to me that Ican be more independent, more honest, more useful as a millionnaire, andthat I shall have better and truer friends!"

John Starkweather looked around at me (I knew I had been absurdly eagerand I was rather ashamed of myself) and put his hand on my knee (he hasa wonderfully fine eye!). 

"I don't believe, " he said, "you'd have any truer friends. "

"Anyway, " I said repentantly, "I'll admit that millionnaires have theirplace--at present I wouldn't do entirely away with them, though I dothink they'd enjoy farming better. And if I were to select amillionnaire for all the best things I know, I should certainly chooseyou, Mr. Starkweather. "

He jumped up. 

"You know who I am?" he asked. 

I nodded. 

"And you knew all the time?"

I nodded. 

"Well, you're a good one!"

We both laughed and fell to talking with the greatest friendliness. Iled him down my garden to show him my prize pie-plant, of which I amenormously proud, and I pulled for him some of the finest stalks I couldfind. 

"Take it home, " I said, "it makes the best pies of any pie-plant in thiscountry. "

He took it under his arm. 

"I want you to come over and see me the first chance you get, " he said. "I'm going to prove to you by physical demonstration that it's bettersport to be a millionnaire than a farmer--not that I am a millionnaire:I'm only accepting the reputation you give me. "

So I walked with him down to the lane. 

"Let me know when you grease up again, " he said, "and I'll come over. "

So we shook hands: and he set off sturdily down the road with thepie-plant leaves waving cheerfully over his shoulder. 

[Illustration: "Somehow, and suddenly, I was a boy again"]

VIII

A BOY AND A PREACHER

This morning I went to church with Harriet. I usually have some excusefor not going, but this morning I had them out one by one and they werealtogether so shabby that I decided not to use them. So I put on mystiff shirt and Harriet came out in her best black cape with the silkfringes. She looked so immaculate, so ruddy, so cheerfully sober (forSunday) that I was reconciled to the idea of driving her up to thechurch. And I am glad I went, for the experience I had. 

It was an ideal summer Sunday: sunshiny, clear and still. I believe ifI had been some Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty years' sleep I shouldhave known it for Sunday. Away off over the hill somewhere we could heara lazy farm boy singing at the top of his voice: the higher cadences ofhis song reached us pleasantly through the still air. The hens sittingnear the lane fence, fluffing the dust over their backs, were holding asmall and talkative service of their own. As we turned into the mainroad we saw the Patterson children on their way to church, all thelittle girls in Sunday ribbons, and all the little boys veryuncomfortable in knit stockings. 

"It seems a pity to go to church on a day like this, " I said to Harriet. 

"A pity!" she exclaimed. "Could anything be more appropriate?"

Harriet is good because she can't help it. Poor woman!--but I haven'tany pity for her. 

It sometimes seems to me the more worshipful I feel the less I want togo to church. I don't know why it is, but these forms, simple thoughthey are, trouble me. The moment an emotion, especially a religiousemotion, becomes an institution, it somehow loses life. True emotion israre and costly and that which is awakened from without never rises tothe height of that which springs spontaneously from within. 

Back of the church stands a long low shed where we tied our horse. Anumber of other buggies were already there, several women were standingin groups, preening their feathers, a neighbour of ours who has atremendous bass voice was talking to a friend:

"Yas, oats is showing up well, but wheat is backward. "

His voice, which he was evidently trying to subdue for Sunday, boomedthrough the still air. So we walked among the trees to the door of thechurch. A smiling elder, in an unaccustomed long coat, bowed and greetedus. As we went in there was an odour of cushions and our footsteps onthe wooden floor echoed in the warm emptiness of the church. The Scotchpreacher was finding his place in the big Bible; he stood solid andshaggy behind the yellow oak pulpit, a peculiar professional look on hisface. In the pulpit the Scotch preacher is too much minister, too littleman. He is best down among us with his hand in ours. He is a sort ofhuman solvent. Is there a twisted and hardened heart in the community hebeams upon it from his cheerful eye, he speaks out of his great charity, he gives the friendly pressure of his large hand, and that hardenedheart dissolves and its frozen hopelessness loses itself in tears. So hegoes through life, seeming always to understand. He is not surprised bywickedness nor discouraged by weakness: he is so sure of a greaterStrength!

But I must come to my experience, which I am almost tempted to call aresurrection--the resurrection of a boy, long since gone away, and of atall lank preacher who, in his humility, looked upon himself as afailure. I hardly know how it all came back to me; possibly it was thescent-laden breeze that came in from the woods and through the half-openchurch window, perhaps it was a line in one of the old songs, perhaps itwas the droning voice of the Scotch preacher--somehow, and suddenly, Iwas a boy again. 

----To this day I think of death as a valley: a dark shadowy valley:the Valley of the Shadow of Death. So persistent are the impressions ofboyhood! As I sat in the church I could see, as distinctly as though Iwere there, the church of my boyhood and the tall dyspeptic preacherlooming above the pulpit, the peculiar way the light came through thecoarse colour of the windows, the barrenness and stiffness of the greatempty room, the raw girders overhead, the prim choir. There wassomething in that preacher, gaunt, worn, sodden though he appeared: aspark somewhere, a little flame, mostly smothered by the gray drearinessof his surroundings, and yet blazing up at times to some warmth. 

As I remember it, our church was a church of failures. They sent us theold gray preachers worn out in other fields. Such a succession of them Iremember, each with some peculiarity, some pathos. They were of the oldsort, indoctrinated Presbyterians, and they harrowed well our barrenfield with the tooth of their hard creed. Some thundered the Law, somepleaded Love; but of all of them I remember best the one who thoughthimself the greatest failure. I think he had tried a hundred churches--ahard life, poorly paid, unappreciated--in a new country. He had once hada family, but one by one they had died. No two were buried in the samecemetery; and finally, before he came to our village, his wife, too, hadgone. And he was old, and out of health, and discouraged: seeking somefinal warmth from his own cold doctrine. How I see him, a trifle bent, in his long worn coat, walking in the country roads: not knowing of aboy who loved him!

He told my father once: I recall his exact, words:

"My days have been long, and I have failed. It was not given me to reachmen's hearts. "

Oh, gray preacher, may I now make amends? Will you forgive me? I was aboy and did not know; a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountainsof reserve: who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he couldhave said: "I love you!"

Of that preacher's sermons I remember not one word, though I must haveheard scores of them--only that they were interminably long and dull andthat my legs grew weary of sitting and that I was often hungry. It wasno doubt the dreadful old doctrine that he preached, thundering thehorrors of disobedience, urging an impossible love through fear and avain belief without reason. All that touched me not at all, save with asort of wonder at the working of his great Adam's apple and the strangerollings of his cavernous eyes. This he looked upon as the work of God;thus for years he had sought, with self-confessed failure, to touch thesouls of his people. How we travel in darkness and the work we do in allseriousness counts for naught, and the thing we toss off in play-time, unconsciously, God uses!

One tow-headed boy sitting there in a front row dreaming dreams, if thesermons touched him not, was yet thrilled to the depths of his being bythat tall preacher. Somewhere, I said, he had a spark within him. Ithink he never knew it: or if he knew it, he regarded it as a waywardimpulse that might lead him from his God. It was a spark of poetry:strange flower in such a husk. In times of emotion it bloomed, but indaily life it emitted no fragrance. I have wondered what might have beenif some one--some understanding woman--had recognised his gift, or if hehimself as a boy had once dared to cut free! We do not know: we do notknow the tragedy of our nearest friend!

By some instinct the preacher chose his readings mostly from the OldTestament--those splendid, marching passages, full of oriental imagery. As he read there would creep into his voice a certain resonance thatlifted him and his calling suddenly above his gray surroundings. 

How vividly I recall his reading of the twenty-third Psalm--a particularreading. I suppose I had heard the passage many times before, but uponthis certain morning----

Shall I ever forget? The windows were open, for it was May, and a boycould look out on the hillside and see with longing eyes the invitinggrass and trees. A soft wind blew in across the church; it was full ofthe very essence of spring. I smell it yet. On the pulpit stood a bunchof crocuses crowded into a vase: some Mary's offering. An old man namedJohnson who sat near us was already beginning to breathe heavily, preparatory to sinking into his regular Sunday snore. Then those wordsfrom the preacher, bringing me suddenly--how shall I express it?--out ofsome formless void, to intense consciousness--a miracle of creation:

"Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I willfear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfortme. "

Well, I saw the way to the place of death that morning; far more vividlyI saw it than any natural scene I know: and myself walking therein. Ishall know it again when I come to pass that way; the tall, dark, rockycliffs, the shadowy path within, the overhanging dark branches, even thewhitened dead bones by the way--and as one of the vivid phantasms ofboyhood--cloaked figures I saw, lurking mysteriously in deep recesses, fearsome for their very silence. And yet I with magic rod and staffwalking within--boldly, fearing no evil, full of faith, hope, courage, love, invoking images of terror but for the joy of braving them. Ah, tow-headed boy, shall I tread as lightly that dread pathway when I cometo it? Shall I, like you, fear no evil!

So that great morning went away. I heard nothing of singing or sermonand came not to myself until my mother, touching my arm, asked me if Ihad been asleep! And I smiled and thought how little grown peopleknew--and I looked up at the sad sick face of the old preacher with anew interest and friendliness. I felt, somehow, that he too was afamiliar of my secret valley. I should have liked to ask him, but I didnot dare. So I followed my mother when she went to speak to him, andwhen he did not see, I touched his coat. 

After that how I watched when he came to the reading. And one greatSunday, he chose a chapter from Ecclesiastes, the one that beginssonorously:

"Remember now thy creator in the days of thyyouth. "

Surely that gaunt preacher had the true fire in his gray soul. How hisvoice dwelt and quivered and softened upon the words!

"While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or thestars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return afterthe rain----"Thus he brought in the universe to thatsmall church and filled the heart of a boy. 

"In the days when the keepers of the house shalltremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and thosethat look out of the windows be darkened. "

"And the doors shall be shut in the streets, whenthe sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise upat the voice of the bird and all the daughters of musicshall be brought low. "

Do not think that I understood the meaning of those passages: I am notvain enough to think I know even now--but the _sound_ of them, the rollof them, the beautiful words, and above all, the pictures!

Those Daughters of Music, how I lived for days imagining them! They wereof the trees and the hills, and they were very beautiful but elusive;one saw them as he heard singing afar off, sweet strains fading ofteninto silences. Daughters of Music! Daughters of Music! And why shouldthey be brought low?

Doors shut in the street--how I _saw_ them--a long, long street, silent, full of sunshine, and the doors shut, and no sound anywhere but the lowsound of the grinding: and the mill with the wheels drowsily turning andno one there at all save one boy with fluttering heart, tiptoeing in thesunlit doorway. 

And the voice of the bird. Not the song but the _voice_. Yes, a bird hada voice. I had known it always, and yet somehow I had not dared to sayit. I felt that they would look at me with that questioning, incredulous look which I dreaded beyond belief. They might laugh! Buthere it was in the Book--the voice of a bird. How my appreciation ofthat Book increased and what a new confidence it gave me in my ownimages! I went about for days, listening, listening, listening--andinterpreting. 

So the words of the preacher and the fire in them:

"And when they shall be afraid of that which ishigh and fears shall be in the way----"

I knew the fear of that which is high: I had dreamed of it commonly. AndI knew also the Fear that stood in the way: him I had seen in a myriadof forms, looming black by darkness in every lane I trod; and yet withwhat defiance I met and slew him!

And then, more thrilling than all else, the words of the preacher:

"Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the goldenbowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. "

Such pictures: that silver cord, that golden bowl! And why andwherefore?

A thousand ways I turned them in my mind--and always with the sound ofthe preacher's voice in my ears--the resonance of the words conveying anindescribable fire of inspiration. Vaguely and yet with certainty I knewthe preacher spoke out of some unfathomable emotion which I did notunderstand--which I did not care to understand. Since then I havethought what those words must have meant to him!

Ah, that tall lank preacher, who thought himself a failure: how long Ishall remember him and the words he read and the mournful yet resonantcadences of his voice--and the barren church, and the stony religion!Heaven he gave me, unknowing, while he preached an ineffectual hell. 

As we rode home Harriet looked into my face. 

"You have enjoyed the service, " she said softly. 

"Yes, " I said. 

"It _was_ a good sermon, " she said. 

"Was it?" I replied. 

IX

THE TRAMP

I have had a new and strange experience--droll in one way, grotesque inanother and when everything is said, tragic: at least an adventure. Harriet looks at me accusingly, and I have had to preserve the air ofone deeply contrite now for two days (no easy accomplishment for me!), even though in secret I have smiled and pondered. 

How our life has been warped by books! We are not contented withrealities: we crave conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond toreal events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, asunconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ending. Aninstinctive desire for completeness animates the human mind (a struggleto circumscribe the infinite). We would like to have life "turnout"--but it doesn't--it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a wholenew genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every storyI heard: "What happened next?" for no conclusion ever quite satisfiedme--even when the hero died in his own gore. I always knew there wassomething yet remaining to be told. The only sure conclusion we canreach is this: Life changes. And what is more enthralling to the humanmind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!--life in themaking? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to takesuch small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the trueexplanation. " By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence withinour finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidificationmeans loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, is old age. 

So I have mused since my tramp came in for a moment out of the Mystery(as we all do) and went away again into the Mystery (in our way, too). 

There are strange things in this world!

 * * * * *

As I came around the corner I saw sitting there on my steps the verypersonification of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck of manhood. Hegave one the impression of having been dropped where he sat, all in aheap. My first instinctive feeling was not one of recoil or even ofhostility, but rather a sudden desire to pick him up and put him wherehe belonged, the instinct, I should say, of the normal man who hangs hisaxe always on the same nail. When he saw me he gathered himself togetherwith reluctance and stood fully revealed. It was a curious attitude ofmingled effrontery and apology. "Hit me if you dare, " blustered hisoutward personality. "For God's sake, don't hit me, " cried the innatefear in his eyes. I stopped and looked at him sharply, His eyes dropped, his look slid away, so that I experienced a sense of shame, as though Ihad trampled upon him. A damp rag of humanity! I confess that my firstimpulse, and a strong one, was to kick him for the good of the humanrace. No man has a right to be like that. 

And then, quite suddenly, I had a great revulsion of feeling. What was Ithat I should judge without knowledge? Perhaps, after all, here was onebearing treasure. So I said:

"You are the man I have been expecting. "

He did not reply, only flashed his eyes up at me, wherein fear deepened. 

"I have been saving up a coat for you, " I said, "and a pair of shoes. They are not much worn, " I said, "but a little too small for me. I thinkthey will fit you. "

He looked at me again, not sharply, but with a sort of weak cunning. Sofar he had not said a word. 

"I think our supper is nearly ready, " I said: "let us go in. "

"No, mister, " he mumbled, "a bite out here--no, mister"--and then, asthough the sound of his own voice inspired him, he grew declamatory. 

"I'm a respectable man, mister, plumber by trade, but----"

"But, " I interrupted, "you can't get any work, you're cold and youhaven't had anything to eat for two days, so you are walking out here inthe country where we farmers have no plumbing to do. At home you have astarving wife and three small children----"

"Six, mister----"

"Well, six--And now we will go in to supper. "

I led him into the entry way and poured for him a big basin of hotwater. As I stepped out again with a comb he was slinking toward thedoorway. 

"Here, " I said, "is a comb; we are having supper now in a few minutes. "

I wish I could picture Harriet's face when I brought him into herimmaculate kitchen. But I gave her a look, one of the commanding sortthat I can put on in times of great emergency, and she silently laidanother place at the table. 

When I came to look at our Ruin by the full lamplight I was surprised tosee what a change a little warm water and a comb had wrought in him. Hecame to the table uncertain, blinking, apologetic. His forehead, I saw, was really impressive--high, narrow and thin-skinned. His face gave onesomehow the impression of a carving once full of significant lines, nowblurred and worn as though Time, having first marked it with the linesof character, had grown discouraged and brushed the hand offorgetfulness over her work. He had peculiar thin, silky hair of noparticular colour, with a certain almost childish pathetic wavinessaround the ears and at the back of the neck. Something, after all, aboutthe man aroused one's compassion. 

I don't know that he looked dissipated, and surely he was not as dirtyas I had at first supposed. Something remained that suggested a care forhimself in the past. It was not dissipation, I decided; it was rather anindefinable looseness and weakness, that gave one alternately thefeeling I had first experienced, that of anger, succeeded by thecompassion that one feels for a child. To Harriet, when she had onceseen him, he was all child, and she all compassion. 

We disturbed him with no questions. Harriet's fundamental quality ishomeliness, comfortableness. Her tea-kettle seems always singing; anindefinable tabbiness, as of feather cushions, lurks in herdining-room, a right warmth of table and chairs, indescribablycomfortable at the end of a chilly day. A busy good-smelling steamarises from all her dishes at once, and the light in the middle of thetable is of a redness that enthralls the human soul. As for Harrietherself, she is the personification of comfort, airy, clean, warm, inexpressibly wholesome. And never in the world is she so engaging aswhen she ministers to a man's hunger. Truthfully, sometimes, when shecomes to me out of the dimmer light of the kitchen to the radiance ofthe table with a plate of muffins, it is as though she and the muffinswere a part of each other, and that she is really offering some ofherself. And down in my heart I know she is doing just that!

Well, it was wonderful to see our Ruin expand in the warmth of Harriet'spresence. He had been doubtful of me; of Harriet, I could see, he wasabsolutely sure. And how he did eat, saying nothing at all, whileHarriet plied him with food and talked to me of the most disarmingcommonplaces. I think it did her heart good to see the way he ate: asthough he had had nothing before in days. As he buttered his muffin, not without some refinement, I could see that his hand was long, acurious, lean, ineffectual hand, with a curving little finger. With thedrinking of the hot coffee colour began to steal up into his face, andwhen Harriet brought out a quarter of pie saved over from our dinner andplaced it before him--a fine brown pie with small hieroglyphics in thetop from whence rose sugary bubbles--he seemed almost to escape himself. And Harriet fairly purred with hospitality. 

The more he ate the more of a man he became. His manners improved, hisback straightened up, he acquired a not unimpressive poise of the head. Such is the miraculous power of hot muffins and pie!

"As you came down, " I asked finally, "did you happen to see old manMasterson's threshing machine?"

"A big red one, with a yellow blow-off?"

"That's the one, " I said. 

"Well, it was just turning into a field about two miles above here, " hereplied. 

"Big gray, banked barn?" I asked. 

"Yes, and a little unpainted house, " said our friend. 

"That's Parsons', " put in Harriet, with a mellow laugh. "I wonder if heever _will_ paint that house. He builds bigger barns every year anddoesn't touch the house. Poor Mrs. Parsons----"

And so we talked of barns and threshing machines in the way we farmerslove to do and I lured our friend slowly into talking about himself. Atfirst he was non-committal enough and what he said seemed curiously madeto order; he used certain set phrases with which to explain simply whatwas not easy to explain--a device not uncommon to all of us. I wasfearful of not getting within this outward armouring, but gradually aswe talked and Harriet poured him a third cup of hot coffee he droppedinto a more familiar tone. He told with some sprightliness of havingseen threshings in Mexico, how the grain was beaten out with flails inthe patios, and afterwards thrown up in the wind to winnow out. 

"You must have seen a good deal of life, " remarked Harrietsympathetically. 

At this remark I saw one of our Ruin's long hands draw up and clinch. Heturned his head toward Harriet. His face was partly in the shadow, butthere was something striking and strange in the way he looked at her, and a deepness in his voice when he spoke:

"Too much! I've seen too much of life. " He threw out one arm and broughtit back with a shudder. 

"You see what it has left me, " he said, "I am an example of too muchlife. "

In response to Harriet's melting compassion he had spoken withunfathomable bitterness. Suddenly he leaned forward toward me with apiercing gaze as though he would look into my soul. His face had changedcompletely; from the loose and vacant mask of the early evening it hadtaken on the utmost tensity of emotion. 

"You do not know, " he said, "what it is to live too much--and to beafraid. "

"Live too much?" I asked. 

"Yes, live too much, that is what I do--and I am afraid. "

He paused a moment and then broke out in a higher key:

"You think I am a tramp. Yes--you do. I know--a worthless fellow, lying, begging, stealing when he can't beg. You have taken me in and fed me. You have said the first kind words I have heard, it seems to me, inyears. I don't know who you are. I shall never see you again. "

I cannot well describe the intensity of the passion with which he spoke, his face shaking with emotion, his hands trembling. 

"Oh, yes, " I said easily, "we are comfortable people here--and it is agood place to live. "

"No no, " he returned. "I know, I've got my call--" Then leaning forwardhe said in a lower, even more intense voice--"I live everythingbeforehand. "

I was startled by the look of his eyes: the abject terror of it: and Ithought to myself, "The man is not right in his mind. " And yet I longedto know of the life within this strange husk of manhood. 

"I know, " he said, as if reading my thought, "you think"--and he tappedhis forehead with one finger--"but I'm not. I'm as sane as you are. "

It was a strange story he told. It seems almost unbelievable to me as Iset it down here, until I reflect how little any one of us knows of thedeep life within his nearest neighbour--what stories there are, whattragedies enacted under a calm exterior! What a drama there _may_ be inthis commonplace man buying ten pounds of sugar at the grocery store, orthis other one driving his two old horses in the town road! We do notknow. And how rarely are the men of inner adventure articulate!Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me. I do notquestion its truth. It came as all truth does, through a clouded andunclean medium: and any judgment of the story itself must be based upona knowledge of the personal equation of the Ruin who told it. 

"I am no tramp, " he said, "in reality, I am no tramp. I began as well asanyone--It doesn't matter now, only I won't have any of the sympathythat people give to the man who has seen better days. I hate sentiment. _I hate it_----"

I cannot attempt to set down the story in his own words. It was brokenwith exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribesof self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes ofintrospection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths ofthe narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so littlethat he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal, some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form. "I am afraid before life, " he said. "It makes me dizzy with thought. "

At another time he said, "If I am a tramp at all, I am a mental tramp. Ihave an unanchored mind. "

It seems that he came to a realisation that there was something peculiarabout him at a very early age. He said they would look at him andwhisper to one another and that his sayings were much repeated, often inhis hearing. He knew that he was considered an extraordinary child: theybaited him with questions that they might laugh at his quaint replies. He said that as early as he could remember he used to plan situations sothat he might say things that were strange and even shocking in achild. His father was a small professor in a small college--a "worm" hecalled him bitterly--"one of those worms that bores in books and finallydries up and blows off. " But his mother--he said she was an angel. Irecall his exact expression about her eyes that "when she looked at oneit made him better. " He spoke of her with a softening of the voice, looking often at Harriet. He talked a good deal about his mother, tryingto account for himself through her. She was not strong, he said, andvery sensitive to the contact of either friends or enemies--evidently anervous, high-strung woman. 

"You have known such people, " he said, "everything hurt her. "

He said she "starved to death. " She starved for affection andunderstanding. 

One of the first things he recalled of his boyhood was his passionatelove for his mother. 

"I can remember, " he said, "lying awake in my bed and thinking how Iwould love her and serve her--and I could see myself in all sorts ofimpossible places saving her from danger. When she came to my room tobid me good night, I imagined how I should look--for I have always beenable to see myself doing things--when I threw my arms around her neck tokiss her. "

Here he reached a strange part of his story. I had been watching Harrietout of the corner of my eye. At first her face was tearful withcompassion, but as the Ruin proceeded it became a study in wonder andfinally in outright alarm. He said that when his mother came in to bidhim good night he saw himself so plainly beforehand ("more vividly thanI see you at this moment") and felt his emotion so keenly that when hismother actually stooped to kiss him, somehow he could not respond, hecould not throw his arms around her neck. He said he often lay quiet, inwaiting, trembling all over until she had gone, not only sufferinghimself but pitying her, because he understood how she must feel. Thenhe would follow her, he said, in imagination through the long hall, seeing himself stealing behind her, just touching her hand, wistfullyhoping that she might turn to him again--and yet fearing. He said no oneknew the agonies he suffered at seeing his mother's disappointment overhis apparent coldness and unresponsiveness. 

"I think, " he said, "it hastened her death. " He would not go to thefuneral; he did not dare, he said. He cried and fought when they came totake him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room andburied his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to herfuneral. He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying inthe cold rain--for it seemed raining--he said he could actually feel thestones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that heshould have seen himself at a distance and _felt_ in his own feet thestones of the road. He said he saw the box taken from the wagon--_saw_it--and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made himshriek until they came running and held him. 

As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and thatthe event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had noheart for the reality itself. 

"It seems strange to you, " he said, "but I am telling you exactly whatmy experience was. "

It was curious, he said, when his father told him he must not do athing, how he went on and imagined in how many different ways he coulddo it--and how, afterward, he imagined he was punished by that "worm, "his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. Of those early days, inwhich he suffered acutely--in idleness, apparently--and perhaps that wasone of the causes of his disorder--he told us at length, but many of theincidents were so evidently worn by the constant handling of his mindthat they gave no clear impression. 

Finally, he ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a whollynew place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me, " hesaid, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled. The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country, " seemedpeculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herdedsheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of thecountry he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he hadgone for gold to Alaska, and worked in the lumber camps of the PacificNorthwest. But he could not escape, he said. In a short time he was nolonger "surprised. " His account of his travels, while fragmentary, had apeculiar vividness. He _saw_ what he described, and he saw it so plainlythat his mind ran off into curious details that made his words strikesometimes like flashes of lightning. A strange and wonderfulmind--uncontrolled. How that man needed the discipline of common work!

I have rarely listened to a story with such rapt interest. It was notonly what he said, nor how he said it, but how he let me see the strangeworkings of his mind. It was continuously a story of a story. When hisvoice finally died down I drew a long breath and was astonished toperceive that it was nearly midnight--and Harriet speechless with heremotions. For a moment he sat quiet and then burst out:

"I cannot get away: I cannot escape, " and the veritable look of sometrapped creature came into his eyes, fear so abject that I reached overand laid my hand on his arm:

"Friend, " I said, "stop here. We have a good country. You have travelledfar enough. I know from experience what a cornfield will do for a man. "

"I have lived all sorts of life, " he continued as if he had not heard aword I said, "and I have lived it all twice, and I am afraid. "

"Face it, " I said, gripping his arm, longing for some power to "blowgrit into him. "

"Face it!" he exclaimed, "don't you suppose I have tried. If I could doa thing--anything--a few times without thinking--_once_ would beenough--I might be all right. I should be all right. "

He brought his fist down on the table, and there was a note ofresolution in his voice. I moved my chair nearer to him, feeling asthough I were saving an immortal soul from destruction. I told him ofour life, how the quiet and the work of it would solve his problems. Isketched with enthusiasm my own experience and I planned swiftly how hecould live, absorbed in simple work--and in books. 

"Try it, " I said eagerly. 

"I will, " he said, rising from the table, and grasping my hand. "I'llstay here. "

I had a peculiar thrill of exultation and triumph. I know how the priestmust feel, having won a soul from torment!

He was trembling with excitement and pale with emotion and weariness. One must begin the quiet life with rest. So I got him off to bed, firstpouring him a bathtub of warm water. I laid out clean clothes by hisbedside and took away his old ones, talking to him cheerfully all thetime about common things. When I finally left him and came downstairs Ifound Harriet standing with frightened eyes in the middle of thekitchen. 

"I'm afraid to have him sleep in this house, " she said. 

But I reassured her. "You do not understand, " I said. 

Owing to the excitement of the evening I spent a restless night. Beforedaylight, while I was dreaming a strange dream of two men running, theone who pursued being the exact counterpart of the one who fled, I heardmy name called aloud:

"David, David!"

I sprang out of bed. 

"The tramp has gone, " called Harriet. 

He had not even slept in his bed. He had raised the window, dropped outon the ground and vanished. 

X

THE INFIDEL

I find that we have an infidel in this community. I don't know that Ishould set down the fact here on good white paper; the walls, they say, have eyes, the stones have ears. But consider these words written inbated breath! The worst of it is--I gather from common report--thisinfidel is a Cheerful Infidel, whereas a true infidel should bear uponhis face the living mark of his infamy. We are all tolerant enough ofthose who do not agree with us, provided only they are sufficientlymiserable! I confess when I first heard of him--through Mrs. Horace(with shudders)--I was possessed of a consuming secret desire to seehim. I even thought of climbing a tree somewhere along the publicroad--like Zaccheus, wasn't it?--and watching him go by. If by anychance he should look my way I could easily avoid discovery by crouchingamong the leaves. It shows how pleasant must be the paths ofunrighteousness that we are tempted to climb trees to see those who walktherein. My imagination busied itself with the infidel. I pictured himas a sort of Moloch treading our pleasant countryside, flames and smokeproceeding from his nostrils, his feet striking fire, his voice like thesound of a great wind. At least that was the picture I formed of himfrom common report. 

And yesterday afternoon I met the infidel and I must here set down atrue account of the adventure. It is, surely, a little new door openedin the house of my understanding. I might travel a whole year in a city, brushing men's elbows, and not once have such an experience. In countryspaces men develop sensitive surfaces, not calloused by too frequentcontact, accepting the new impression vividly and keeping it bright tothink upon. 

I met the infidel as the result of a rather unexpected series ofincidents. I don't think I have said before that we have for some timebeen expecting a great event on this farm. We have raised corn andbuckwheat, we have a fertile asparagus bed and onions and pie-plant(enough to supply the entire population of this community) and I can'ttell how many other vegetables. We have had plenty of chickens hatchedout (I don't like chickens, especially hens, especially a certain gauntand predatory hen named [so Harriet says] Evangeline, who belongs to aneighbour of ours) and we have had two litters of pigs, but until thisbright moment of expectancy we never have had a calf. 

Upon the advice of Horace, which I often lean upon as upon a staff, Ihave been keeping my young heifer shut up in the cow-yard now for a weekor two. But yesterday, toward the middle of the afternoon, I found thefence broken down and the cow-yard empty. From what Harriet said, thebrown cow must have been gone since early morning. I knew, of course, what that meant, and straightway I took a stout stick and set off overthe hill, tracing the brown cow as far as I could by her tracks. She hadmade way toward a clump of trees near Horace's wood lot, where Iconfidently expected to find her. But as fate would have it, the pasturegate, which is rarely used, stood open and the tracks led outward intoan old road. I followed rapidly, half pleased that I had not found herwithin the wood. It was a promise of new adventure which I came to withdownright enjoyment (confidentially--I should have been cultivatingcorn!). I peered into every thicket as I passed: once I climbed an oldfence and, standing on the top rail, intently surveyed my neighbour'spasture. No brown cow was to be seen. At the crossing of the brook Ishouldered my way from the road down a path among the alders, thinkingthe brown cow might have gone that way to obscurity. 

It is curious how, in spite of domestication and training, Nature in hergreat moments returns to the primitive and instinctive! My brown cow, never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle ananimal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless, ages-old law of her breed: she had escaped in her great moment to themost secret place she knew. It did not matter that she would have beensafer in my yard--both she and her calf--that she would have been surerof her food; she could only obey the old wild law. So turkeys will hidetheir nests. So the tame duck, tame for unnumbered generations, hearingfrom afar the shrill cry of the wild drake, will desert her quietsurroundings, spread her little-used wings and become for a time thewildest of the wild. 

So we think--you and I--that we are civilised! But how often, how often, have we felt that old wildness which is our common heritage, scarceshackled, clamouring in our blood!

I stood listening among the alders, in the deep cool shade. Here andthere a ray of sunshine came through the thick foliage: I could see itwhere it silvered the cobweb ladders of those moist spaces. Somewhere inthe thicket I heard an unalarmed catbird trilling her exquisite song, astartled frog leaped with a splash into the water; faint odours of someblossoming growth, not distinguishable, filled the still air. It wasone of those rare moments when one seems to have caught Nature unaware. I lingered a full minute, listening, looking; but my brown cow had notgone that way. So I turned and went up rapidly to the road, and there Ifound myself almost face to face with a ruddy little man whosecountenance bore a look of round astonishment. We were both surprised. Irecovered first. 

"Have you seen a brown cow?" I asked. 

He was still so astonished that he began to look around him; he thrusthis hands nervously into his coat pockets and pulled them out again. 

"I think you won't find her in there, " I said, seeking to relieve hisembarrassment. 

But I didn't know, then, how very serious a person I had encountered. 

"No--no, " he stammered, "I haven't seen your cow. "

So I explained to him with sobriety, and at some length, the problem Ihad to solve. He was greatly interested and inasmuch as he was going myway he offered at once to assist me in my search. So we set offtogether. He was rather stocky of build, and decidedly short of breath, so that I regulated my customary stride to suit his deliberation. Atfirst, being filled with the spirit of my adventure, I was notaltogether pleased with this arrangement. Our conversation ran somethinglike this:

STRANGER: Has she any spots or marks on her?

MYSELF: No, she is plain brown. 

STRANGER: How old a cow is she?

MYSELF: This is her first calf. 

STRANGER: Valuable animal?

MYSELF: _(fencing):_ I have never put a price on her; she is a promisingyoung heifer. 

STRANGER: Pure blood?

MYSELF: No, grade. 

After a pause:

STRANGER: Live around here?

MYSELF: Yes, half a mile below here. Do you?

STRANGER: Yes, three miles above here. My name's Purdy. 

MYSELF: Mine is Grayson. 

He turned to me solemnly and held out his hand. "_I'm_ glad to meet you, Mr. Grayson, " he said. "And I'm glad, " I said, "to meet you, Mr. Purdy. "

I will not attempt to put down all we said: I couldn't. But by suchdevices is the truth in the country made manifest. 

So we continued to walk and look. Occasionally I would unconsciouslyincrease my pace until I was warned to desist by the puffing of Mr. Purdy. He gave an essential impression of genial timidity: and how he_did_ love to talk!

We came at last to a rough bit of land grown up to scrubby oaks andhazel brush. 

"This, " said Mr. Purdy, "looks hopeful. "

We followed the old road, examining every bare spot of earth for someevidence of the cow's tracks, but without finding so much as a sign. Iwas for pushing onward but Mr. Purdy insisted that this clump of woodswas exactly such a place as a cow would like. He developed such acapacity for argumentation and seemed so sure of what he was talkingabout that I yielded, and we entered the wood. 

"We'll part here, " he said: "you keep over there about fifty yards andI'll go straight ahead. In that way we'll cover the ground. Keepa-shoutin'. "

So we started and I kept a-shoutin'. He would answer from time to time:"Hulloo hulloo!"

It was a wild and beautiful bit of forest. The ground under the treeswas thickly covered with enormous ferns or bracken, with here and therepatches of light where the sun came through the foliage. The low spotswere filled with the coarse green verdure of skunk cabbage. I was sosceptical about finding the cow in a wood where concealment was so easythat I confess I rather idled and enjoyed the surroundings. Suddenly, however, I heard Mr. Purdy's voice, with a new note in it:

"Hulloo, hulloo----"

"What luck?"

"Hulloo, hulloo----"

"I'm coming--" and I turned and ran as rapidly as I could through thetrees, jumping over logs and dodging low branches, wondering what newthing my friend had discovered. So I came to his side. 

"Have you got trace of her?" I questioned eagerly. 

"Sh!" he said, "over there. Don't you see her?"

"Where, where?"

He pointed, but for a moment I could see nothing but the trees and thebracken. Then all at once, like the puzzle in a picture, I saw herplainly. She was standing perfectly motionless, her head lowered, and insuch a peculiar clump of bushes and ferns that she was all butindistinguishable. It was wonderful, the perfection with which herinstinct had led her to conceal herself. 

All excitement, I started toward her at once. But Mr. Purdy put his handon my arm. 

"Wait, " he said, "don't frighten her. She has her calf there. "

"No!" I exclaimed, for I could see nothing of it. 

We went, cautiously, a few steps nearer. She threw up her head andlooked at us so wildly for a moment that I should hardly have known herfor my cow. She was, indeed, for the time being, a wild creature of thewood. She made a low sound and advanced a step threateningly. 

"Steady, " said Mr. Purdy, "this is her first calf. Stop a minute andkeep quiet. She'll soon get used to us. "

Moving to one side cautiously, we sat down on an old log. The brownheifer paused, every muscle tense, her eyes literally blazing, We satperfectly still. After a minute or two she lowered her head, and withcurious guttural sounds she began to lick her calf, which lay quitehidden in the bracken. 

"She has chosen a perfect spot, " I thought to myself, for it was thewildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At oneside, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one sidewith moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poorscrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earthunderneath was soft and springy with leaf mould. --

Mr. Purdy was one to whom silence was painful; he fidgeted about, evidently bursting with talk, and yet feeling compelled to follow hisown injunction of silence. Presently he reached into his capaciouspocket and handed me a little paper-covered booklet. I took it, curious, and read the title:

"Is There a Hell?"

It struck me humorously. In the country we are always--at least some ofus are--more or less in a religious ferment, The city may distractitself to the point where faith is unnecessary; but in the country wemust, perforce, have something to believe in. And we talk about it, too!I read the title aloud, but in a low voice:

"Is There a Hell?" Then I asked: "Do you really want to know?"

"The argument is all there, " he replied. 

"Well, " I said, "I can tell you off-hand, out of my own experience, thatthere certainly is a hell----"

He turned toward me with evident astonishment, but I proceeded withtranquillity:

"Yes, sir, there's no doubt about it. I've been near enough myselfseveral times to smell the smoke. It isn't around here, " I said. 

As he looked at me his china-blue eyes grew larger, if that werepossible, and his serious, gentle face took on a look of painedsurprise. 

"Before you say such things, " he said, "I beg you to read my book. "

He took the tract from my hands and opened it on his knee. 

"The Bible tells us, " he said, "that in the beginning God created theheavens and the earth, He made the firmament and divided the waters. But does the Bible say that He created a hell or a devil? Does it?"

I shook my head. 

"Well, then!" he said triumphantly, "and that isn't all, either. Thehistorian Moses gives in detail a full account of what was made in sixdays. He tells how day and night were created, how the sun and the moonand the stars were made; he tells how God created the flowers of thefield, and the insects, and the birds, and the great whales, and said, 'Be fruitful and multiply, ' He accounts for every minute of the time inthe entire six days--and of course God rested on the seventh--and thereis not one word about hell. Is there?"

I shook my head. 

"Well then--" exultantly, "where is it? I'd like to have any man, nomatter how wise he is, answer that. Where is it?"

"That, " I said, "has troubled me, too. We don't always know just whereour hells are. If we did we might avoid them. We are not so sensitive tothem as we should be--do you think?"

He looked at me intently: I went on before he could answer:

"Why, I've seen men in my time living from day to day in the veryatmosphere of perpetual torment, and actually arguing that there was nohell. It is a strange sight, I assure you, and one that will trouble youafterwards. From what I know of hell, it is a place of very looseboundaries. Sometimes I've thought we couldn't be quite sure when wewere in it and when we were not. "

I did not tell my friend, but I was thinking of the remark of oldSwedenborg: "The trouble with hell is we shall not know it when wearrive. "

At this point Mr. Purdy burst out again, having opened his little bookat another page. 

"When Adam and Eve had sinned, " he said, "and the God of Heaven walkedin the garden in the cool of the evening and called for them and theyhad hidden themselves on account of their disobedience, did God say tothem: Unless you repent of your sins and get forgiveness I will shut youup in yon dark and dismal hell and torment you (or have the devil do it)for ever and ever? Was there such a word?"

I shook my head. 

[Illustration: "He reached into his pocket and handed me a littlepaper-covered booklet"]

"No, sir, " he said vehemently, "there was not. "

"But does it say, " I asked, "that Adam and Eve had not themselves beenusing their best wits in creating a hell? That point has occurred to me. In my experience I've known both Adams and Eves who were most adroit intheir capacity for making places of torment--and afterwards of gettinginto them. Just watch yourself some day after you've sown a crop ofdesires and you'll see promising little hells starting up within youlike pigweeds and pusley after a warm rain in your garden. And ourheavens, too, for that matter--they grow to our own planting: and howsensitive they are too! How soon the hot wind of a passion withers themaway! How surely the fires of selfishness blacken their perfection!"

I'd almost forgotten Mr. Purdy--and when I looked around, his face worea peculiar puzzled expression not unmixed with alarm. He held up hislittle book eagerly almost in my face. 

"If God had intended to create a hell, " he said, "I assert without fearof successful contradiction that when God was there in the Garden ofEden it was the time for Him to have put Adam and Eve and all theirposterity on notice that there was a place of everlasting torment. Itwould have been only a square deal for Him to do so. But did He?"

I shook my head. 

"He did not. If He had mentioned hell on that occasion I should not nowdispute its existence. But He did not. This is what He said to Adam--thevery words: 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thoureturn unto the ground: for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thouart, and unto dust shalt thou return. ' You see He did not say 'Unto hellshalt thou return. ' He said, 'Unto dust. ' That isn't hell, is it?"

"Well, " I said, "there are in my experience a great many different kindsof hells. There are almost as many kinds of hells as there are men andwomen upon this earth. Now, your hell wouldn't terrify me in the least. My own makes me no end of trouble. Talk about burning pitch andbrimstone: how futile were the imaginations of the old fellows whoconjured up such puerile torments. Why, I can tell you of no end ofhells that are worse--and not half try. Once I remember, when I wasyounger----"

I happened to glance around at my companion. He sat there looking at mewith horror--fascinated horror. 

"Well, I won't disturb your peace of mind by telling _that_ story, " Isaid. 

"Do you believe that we shall go to hell?" he asked in a low voice. 

"That depends, " I said. "Let's leave out the question of 'we'; let's bemore comfortably general in our discussion. I think we can safely saythat some go and some do not. It's a curious and noteworthy thing, " Isaid, "but I've known of cases--There are some people who aren't reallyworth good honest tormenting--let alone the rewards of heavenly bliss. They just haven't anything to torment! What is going to become of suchfolks? I confess I don't know. You remember when Dante began his journeyinto the infernal regions----"

"I don't believe a word of that Dante, " he interrupted excitedly; "it'sall a made up story. There isn't a word of truth in it; it is ablasphemous book. Let me read you what I say about it in here. "

"I will agree with you without argument, " I said, "that it is not _all_true. I merely wanted to speak of one of Dante's experiences as anillustration of the point I'm making. You remember that almost the firstspirits he met on his journey were those who had never done anything inthis life to merit either heaven or hell. That always struck me as beingabout the worst plight imaginable for a human being. Think of a creaturenot even worth good honest brimstone!"

Since I came home, I've looked up the passage; and it is a wonderfulone. Dante heard wailings and groans and terrible things said in manytongues. Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were onlythose "who had lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing butthemselves. " "Heaven would not dull its brightness with those, nor wouldlower hell receive them. "

"And what is it, " asked Dante, "that makes them so grievously suffer?"

"Hopelessness of death, " said Virgil, "Their blind existence here, andimmemorable former life, make them so wretched that they envy everyother lot. Mercy and Justice alike disdain them. Let us speak of themno more. Look, and pass!"

But Mr. Purdy, in spite of his timidity, was a man of much persistence. 

"They tell me, " he said, "when they try to prove the reasonableness ofhell, that unless you show sinners how they're goin' to be tormented, they'd never repent. Now, I say that if a man has to be scared intoreligion, his religion ain't much good. "

"There, " I said, "I agree with you completely. "

His face lighted up, and he continued eagerly:

"And I tell 'em: You just go ahead and try for heaven; don't pay anyattention to all this talk about everlasting punishment. "

"Good advice!" I said. 

It had begun to grow dark. The brown cow was quiet at last. We couldhear small faint sounds from the calf. I started slowly through thebracken. Mr. Purdy hung at my elbow, stumbling sideways as he walked, but continuing to talk eagerly. So we came to the place where the calflay. I spoke in a low voice:

"So boss, so boss. "

I would have laid my hand on her neck but she started back with a wildtoss of her horns. It was a beautiful calf! I looked at it with apeculiar feeling of exultation, pride, ownership. It was red-brown, witha round curly pate and one white leg. As it lay curled there among theferns, it was really beautiful to look at. When we approached, it didnot so much as stir. I lifted it to its legs, upon which the cowuttered a strange half-wild cry and ran a few steps off, her head thrownin the air. The calf fell back as though it had no legs. 

"She is telling it not to stand up, " said Mr. Purdy. 

I had been afraid at first that something was the matter!

"Some are like that, " he said. "Some call their calves to run. Otherswon't let you come near 'em at all; and I've even known of a case where acow gored its calf to death rather than let anyone touch it. "

I looked at Mr. Purdy not without a feeling of admiration. This was athing he knew: a language not taught in the universities. How well itbecame him to know it; how simply he expressed it! I thought to myself:There are not many men in this world, after all, that it will not payus to go to school to--for something or other. 

I should never have been able, indeed, to get the cow and calf home, last night at least, if it had not been for my chance friend. He knewexactly what to do and how to do it. He wore a stout coat of denim, rather long in the skirts. This he slipped off, while I looked on insome astonishment, and spread it out on the ground. He placed my staffunder one side of it and found another stick nearly the same size forthe other side. These he wound into the coat until he had made a sort ofstretcher. Upon this we placed the unresisting calf. What a fine one itwas! Then, he in front and I behind, we carried the stretcher and itsburden out of the wood. The cow followed, sometimes threatening, sometimes bellowing, sometimes starting off wildly, head and tail in theair, only to rush back and, venturing up with trembling muscles, touchher tongue to the calf, uttering low maternal sounds. 

"Keep steady, " said Mr. Purdy, "and everything'll be all right. "

When we came to the brook we stopped to rest. I think my companion wouldhave liked to start his argument again, but he was too short of breath. 

It was a prime spring evening! The frogs were tuning up. I heard adrowsy cowbell somewhere over the hills in the pasture. The brown cow, with eager, outstretched neck, was licking her calf as it lay there onthe improvised stretcher. I looked up at the sky, a blue avenue ofheaven between the tree tops; I felt the peculiar sense of mystery whichnature so commonly conveys. 

"I have been too sure!" I said. "What do we know after all! Why maythere not be future heavens and hells--'other heavens for other earths'?We do not know--we do not _know_--"

So, carrying the calf, in the cool of the evening, we came at last to myyard. We had no sooner put the calf down than it jumped nimbly to itsfeet and ran, wobbling absurdly, to meet its mother. 

"The rascal, " I said, "after all our work. "

"It's the nature of the animal, " said Mr. Purdy, as he put on his coat. 

I could not thank him enough. I invited him to stay with us to supper, but he said he must hurry home. 

"Then come down soon to see me, " I said, "and we will settle thisquestion as to the existence of a hell. "

He stepped up close to me and said, with an appealing note in his voice:

"You do not really believe in a hell, do you?"

How human nature loves collusiveness: nothing short of the categoricalwill satisfy us! What I said to Mr. Purdy evidently appeased him, for heseized my hand and shook and shook. 

"We haven't understood each other, " he said eagerly. "You don't believein eternal damnation any more than I do. " Then he added, as though somenew uncertainty puzzled him, "Do you?"

At supper I was telling Harriet with gusto of my experiences. Suddenlyshe broke out:

"What was his name?"

"Purdy. "

"Why, he's the infidel that Mrs. Horace tells about!"

"Is that possible?" I said, and I dropped my knife and fork. Thestrangest sensation came over me. 

"Why, " I said, "then I'm an infidel too!"

So I laughed and I've been laughing gloriously ever since--at myself, atthe infidel, at the entire neighbourhood. I recalled that delightfulcharacter in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (my friend the Scotch Preacherloves to tell about him), who seasons error by crying out "Fudge!"

"Fudge!" I said. 

We're all poor sinners!

XI

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

_Sunday afternoon, June 9. _

We had a funeral to-day in this community and the longest funeralprocession, Charles Baxter says, he has seen in all the years of hismemory among these hills. A good man has gone away--and yet remains. Inthe comparatively short time I have been here I never came to know himwell personally, though I saw him often in the country roads, a ruddyold gentleman with thick, coarse, iron-gray hair, somewhat stern ofcountenance, somewhat shabby of attire, sitting as erect as a trooper inhis open buggy, one muscular hand resting on his knee, the other holdingthe reins of his familiar old white horse. I said I did not come to knowhim well personally, and yet no one who knows this community can helpknowing Doctor John North. I never so desired the gift of movingexpression as I do at this moment, on my return from his funeral, that Imay give some faint idea of what a good man means to a community likeours--as the more complete knowledge of it has come to me to-day. 

In the district school that I attended when a boy we used to love toleave our mark, as we called it, wherever our rovings led us. It was abit of boyish mysticism, unaccountable now that we have grown older andwiser (perhaps); but it had its meaning. It was an instinctiveoutreaching of the young soul to perpetuate the knowledge of itsexistence upon this forgetful earth. My mark, I remember, was a notchand a cross. With what secret fond diligence I carved it in the graybark of beech trees, on fence posts, or on barn doors, and once, Iremember, on the roof-ridge of our home, and once, with high imaginingsof how long it would remain, I spent hours chiseling it deep in ahard-headed old boulder in the pasture, where, if man has been as kindas Nature, it remains to this day. If you should chance to see it youwould not know of the boy who carved it there. 

So Doctor North left his secret mark upon the neighbourhood--as all ofus do, for good or for ill, upon _our_ neighbourhoods, in accordancewith the strength of that character which abides within us. For a longtime I did not know that it was he, though it was not difficult to seethat some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mysticsign of him deep-lettered in the hearthstone of a home; I heard itspeaking bravely from the weak lips of a friend; it is carved in theplastic heart of many a boy. No, I do not doubt the immortalities of thesoul; in this community, which I have come to love so much, dwells morethan one of John North's immortalities--and will continue to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because John North was here. 

He was in no outward way an extraordinary man, nor was his lifeeventful. He was born in this neighbourhood: I saw him lying quite stillthis morning in the same sunny room of the same house where he first sawthe light of day. Here among these common hills he grew up, and save forthe few years he spent at school or in the army, he lived here all hislife long. In old neighbourhoods and especially farm neighbourhoodspeople come to know one another--not clothes knowledge, or moneyknowledge--but that sort of knowledge which reaches down into the hiddensprings of human character. A country community may be deceived by astranger, too easily deceived, but not by one of its own people. For itis not a studied knowledge; it resembles that slow geologic uncoveringbefore which not even the deep buried bones of the prehistoric saurianremain finally hidden. 

I never fully realised until this morning what a supreme triumph it is, having grown old, to merit the respect of those who know us best. Meregreatness offers no reward to compare with it, for greatness compelsthat homage which we freely bestow upon goodness. So long as I live Ishall never forget this morning. I stood in the door-yard outside ofthe open window of the old doctor's home. It was soft, and warm, andvery still--a June Sunday morning. An apple tree not far off was stillin blossom, and across the road on a grassy hillside sheep fedunconcernedly. Occasionally, from the roadway where the horses of thecountryside were waiting, I heard the clink of a bit-ring or the lowvoice of some new-comer seeking a place to hitch. Not half those whocame could find room in the house: they stood uncovered among the trees. From within, wafted through the window, came the faint odour of flowers, and the occasional minor intonation of someone speaking--and finally ourown Scotch Preacher! I could not see him, but there lay in the cadencesof his voice a peculiar note of peacefulness, of finality. The daybefore he died Dr. North had said:

"I want McAlway to conduct my funeral, not as a minister but as a man. He has been my friend for forty years; he will know what I mean. "

The Scotch Preacher did not say much. Why should he? Everyone there_knew_: and speech would only have cheapened what we knew. And I do notnow recall even the little he said, for there was so much all about methat spoke not of the death of a good man, but of his life. A boy whostood near me--a boy no longer, for he was as tall as a man--gave a moreeloquent tribute than any preacher could have done. I saw him stand hisground for a time with that grim courage of youth which dreads emotionmore than a battle: and then I saw him crying behind a tree! He was nota relative of the old doctor's; he was only one of many into whose deeplife the doctor had entered. 

They sang "Lead, Kindly Light, " and came out through the narrow doorwayinto the sunshine with the coffin, the hats of the pallbearers in a rowon top, and there was hardly a dry eye among us. 

And as they came out through the narrow doorway, I thought how theDoctor must have looked out daily through so many, many years upon thisbeauty of hills and fields and of sky above, grown dearer from longfamiliarity--which he would know no more. And Kate North, the Doctor'ssister, his only relative, followed behind, her fine old face gray andset, but without a tear in her eye. How like the Doctor she looked: thesame stern control!

In the hours which followed, on the pleasant winding way to thecemetery, in the groups under the trees, on the way homeward again, thecommunity spoke its true heart, and I have come back with the feelingthat human nature, at bottom, is sound and sweet. I knew a great dealbefore about Doctor North, but I knew it as knowledge, not as emotion, and therefore it was not really a part of my life. 

I heard again the stories of how he drove the country roads, winter andsummer, how he had seen most of the population into the world and hadheld the hands of many who went out! It was the plain, hard life of acountry doctor, and yet it seemed to rise in our community like somegreat tree, its roots deep buried in the soil of our common life, itsbranches close to the sky. To those accustomed to the outwardexcitements of city life it would have seemed barren and uneventful. Itwas significant that the talk was not so much of what the Doctor did asof _how_ he did it, not so much of his actions as of the naturalexpression of his character. And when we come to think of it, goodness_is_ uneventful. It does not flash, it glows. It is deep, quiet and verysimple. It passes not with oratory, it is commonly foreign to riches, nor does it often sit in the places of the mighty: but may be felt inthe touch of a friendly hand or the look of a kindly eye. 

Outwardly, John North often gave the impression of brusqueness. Many awoman, going to him for the first time, and until she learned that hewas in reality as gentle as a girl, was frightened by his manner. Thecountry is full of stories of such encounters. We laugh yet over theadventure of a woman who formerly came to spend her summers here. Shedressed very beautifully and was "nervous. " One day she went to call onthe Doctor. He made a careful examination and asked many questions. Finally he said, with portentous solemnity:

"Madam, you're suffering from a very common complaint. "

The Doctor paused, then continued, impressively:

"You haven't enough work to do. This is what I would advise. Go home, discharge your servants, do your own cooking, wash your own clothes andmake your own beds. You'll get well. "

She is reported to have been much offended, and yet to-day there was awreath of white roses in Doctor North's room sent from the city by thatwoman. 

If he really hated anything in this world the Doctor hated whimperers. He had a deep sense of the purpose and need of punishment, and hedespised those who fled from wholesome discipline. 

A young fellow once went to the Doctor--so they tell the story--andasked for something to stop his pain. 

"Stop it!" exclaimed the Doctor: "why, it's good for you. You've donewrong, haven't you? Well, you're being punished; take it like a man. There's nothing more wholesome than good honest pain. "

And yet how much pain he alleviated in this community--in forty years!

The deep sense that a man should stand up to his fate was one of thekey-notes of his character; and the way he taught it, not only by wordbut by every action of his life, put heart into many a weak man andwoman, Mrs. Patterson, a friend of ours, tells of a reply she once hadfrom the Doctor to whom she had gone with a new trouble. After tellinghim about it she said:

"I've left it all with the Lord. "

"You'd have done better, " said the Doctor, "to keep it yourself. Troubleis for your discipline: the Lord doesn't need it. "

It was thus out of his wisdom that he was always telling people whatthey knew, deep down in their hearts, to be true. It sometimes hurt atfirst, but sooner or later, if the man had a spark of real manhood inhim, he came back, and gave the Doctor an abiding affection. 

There were those who, though they loved him, called him intolerant. Inever could look at it that way. He _did_ have the only kind ofintolerance which is at all tolerable, and that is the intolerance ofintolerance. He always set himself with vigour against that unreason andlack of sympathy which are the essence of intolerance; and yet there wasa rock of conviction on many subjects behind which he could not bedriven. It was not intolerance: it was with him a reasoned certainty ofbelief. He had a phrase to express that not uncommon state of mind inthis age particularly, which is politely willing to yield its footholdwithin this universe to almost any reasoner who suggests some otheruniverse, however shadowy, to stand upon. He called it a "mush ofconcession. " He might have been wrong in his convictions, but he, atleast, never floundered in a "mush of concession. " I heard him say once:

"There are some things a man can't concede, and one is, that a man whohas broken a law, like a man who has broken a leg, has got to suffer forit. "

It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be prevailed uponto present a bill. It was not because the community was poor, thoughsome of our people are poor, and it was certainly not because the Doctorwas rich and could afford such philanthropy, for, saving a ratherunproductive farm which during the last ten years of his life lay whollyuncultivated, he was as poor as any man in the community. He simplyseemed to forget that people owed him. 

It came to be a common and humorous experience for people to go to theDoctor and say:

"Now, Doctor North, how much do I owe you? You remember you attended mywife two years ago when the baby came--and John when he had thediphtheria----"

"Yes, yes, " said the Doctor, "I remember. "

"I thought I ought to pay you. "

"Well, I'll look it up when I get time. "

But he wouldn't. The only way was to go to him and say:

"Doctor, I want to pay ten dollars on account. "

"All right, " he'd answer, and take the money. 

To the credit of the community I may say with truthfulness that theDoctor never suffered. He was even able to supply himself with the bestinstruments that money could buy. To him nothing was too good for ourneighbourhood. This morning I saw in a case at his home a complete setof oculist's instruments, said to be the best in the county--a veryunusual equipment for a country doctor. Indeed, he assumed that theresponsibility for the health of the community rested upon him. He was asort of self-constituted health officer. He was always sniffing aboutfor old wells and damp cellars--and somehow, with his crisp humour andsound sense, getting them cleaned. In his old age he even grewquerulously particular about these things--asking a little more of humannature than it could quite accomplish. There were innumerable otherways--how they came out to-day all glorified now that he is gone!--inwhich he served the community. 

Horace tells how he once met the Doctor driving his old white horse inthe town road. 

"Horace, " called the Doctor, "why don't you paint your barn?"

"Well, " said Horace, "it _is_ beginning to look a bit shabby. "

"Horace, " said the Doctor, "you're a prominent citizen. We look to youto keep up the credit of the neighbourhood. "

Horace painted his barn. 

I think Doctor North was fonder of Charles Baxter than of anyone else, save his sister. He hated sham and cant: if a man had a single _reality_in him the old Doctor found it; and Charles Baxter in many ways exceedsany man I ever knew in the downright quality of genuineness. The Doctorwas never tired of telling--and with humour--how he once went to Baxterto have a table made for his office. When he came to get it he foundthe table upside clown and Baxter on his knees finishing off the underpart of the drawer slides. Baxter looked up and smiled in the engagingway he has, and continued his work. After watching him for some time theDoctor said:

"Baxter, why do you spend so much time on that table? Who's going toknow whether or not the last touch has been put on the under side ofit?"

Baxter straightened up and looked at the Doctor in surprise. 

"Why, I will, " he said. 

How the Doctor loved to tell that story! I warrant there is no boy whoever grew up in this country who hasn't heard it. 

It was a part of his pride in finding reality that made the Doctor sucha lover of true sentiment and such a hater of sentimentality. I prizeone memory of him which illustrates this point. The district school gavea "speaking" and we all went. One boy with a fresh young voice spoke a"soldier piece"--the soliloquy of a one-armed veteran who sits at awindow and sees the troops go by with dancing banners and glitteringbayonets, and the people cheering and shouting. And the refrain wentsomething like this:

"Never again call 'Comrade' To the men who were comrades for years;Never again call 'Brother' To the men we think of with tears. "

I happened to look around while the boy was speaking, and there sat theold Doctor with the tears rolling unheeded down his ruddy face; he wasthinking, no doubt, of _his_ war time and the comrades _he_ knew. 

On the other hand, how he despised fustian and bombast. His "Bah!"delivered explosively, was often like a breath of fresh air in a stuffyroom. Several years ago, before I came here--and it is one of thehistoric stories of the county--there was a semi-political Fourth ofJuly celebration with a number of ambitious orators. One of them, ayoung fellow of small worth who wanted to be elected to the legislature, made an impassioned address on "Patriotism. " The Doctor was present, forhe liked gatherings: he liked people. But he did not like the youngorator, and did not want him to be elected. In the midst of the speech, while the audience was being carried through the clouds of oratory, theDoctor was seen to be growing more and more uneasy. Finally he burstout:

"Bah!"

The orator caught himself, and then swept on again. 

"Bah!" said the Doctor. 

By this time the audience was really interested. The orator stopped. Heknew the Doctor, and he should have known better than to say what hedid. But he was very young and he knew the Doctor was opposing him. 

"Perhaps, " he remarked sarcastically, "the Doctor can make a betterspeech than I can. "

The Doctor rose instantly, to his full height--and he was animpressive-looking man. 

"Perhaps, " he said, "I can, and what is more, I will. " He stood up on achair and gave them a talk on Patriotism--real patriotism--thepatriotism of duty done in the small concerns of life. That speech, which ended the political career of the orator, is not forgotten to-day. 

One thing I heard to-day about the old Doctor impressed me deeply. Ihave been thinking about it ever since: it illuminates his charactermore than anything I have heard. It is singular, too, that I should nothave known the story before. I don't believe it was because it allhappened so long ago; it rather remained untold out of deference to asort of neighbourhood delicacy. 

I had, indeed, wondered why a man of such capacities, so many qualitiesof real greatness and power, should have escaped a city career. I saidsomething to this effect to a group of men with whom I was talking thismorning. I thought they exchanged glances; one said:

"When he first came out of the army he'd made such a fine record as asurgeon that everyone-urged him to go to the city and practice----"

A pause followed which no one seemed inclined to fill. 

"But he didn't go, " I said. 

"No, he didn't go. He was a brilliant young fellow. He _knew_ a lot, andhe was popular, too. He'd have had a great success----"

Another pause. 

"But he didn't go?" I asked promptingly. 

"No; he staid here. He was better educated than any man in this county. Why, I've seen him more'n once pick up a book of Latin and read it _forpleasure_. "

I could see that all this was purposely irrelevant, and I liked them forit. But walking home from the cemetery Horace gave me the story; thecommunity knew it to the last detail. I suppose it is a story notuncommon among men, but this morning, told of the old Doctor we had justlaid away, it struck me with a tragic poignancy difficult to describe. 

"Yes, " said Horace, "he was to have been married, forty years ago, andthe match was broken off because he was a drunkard. "

"A drunkard!" I exclaimed, with a shock I cannot convey. 

"Yes, sir, " said Horace, "one o' the worst you ever see. He got it inthe army. Handsome, wild, brilliant--that was the Doctor. I was a littleboy but I remember it mighty well. "

He told me the whole distressing story. It was all a long time ago andthe details do not matter now. It was to be expected that a man like theold Doctor should love, love once, and love as few men do. And that iswhat he did--and the girl left him because he was a drunkard!

"They all thought, " said Horace, "that he'd up an' kill himself. Hesaid he would, but he didn't. Instid o' that he put an open bottle onhis table and he looked at it and said: 'Which is stronger, now, you orJohn North? We'll make that the test, ' he said, 'we'll live or die bythat. ' Them was his exact words. He couldn't sleep nights and he gothaggard like a sick man, but he left the bottle there and never touchedit. "

How my heart throbbed with the thought of that old silent struggle! Howmuch it explained; how near it brought all these people around him! Itmade him so human. It is the tragic necessity (but the salvation) ofmany a man that he should come finally to an irretrievable experience, to the assurance that everything is lost. For with that moment, if he bestrong, he is saved. I wonder if anyone ever attains real human sympathywho has not passed through the fire of some such experience. Or tohumour either! For in the best laughter do we not hear constantly thatdeep minor note which speaks of the ache in the human heart? It seems tome I can understand Doctor North!

He died Friday morning. He had been lying very quiet all night;suddenly he opened his eyes and said to his sister: "Good-bye, Kate, "and shut them again. That was all. The last call had come and he wasready for it. I looked at his face after death. I saw the iron lines ofthat old struggle in his mouth and chin; and the humour that it broughthim in the lines around his deep-set eyes. 

----And as I think of him this afternoon, I can see him--curiously, forI can hardly explain it--carrying a banner as in battle right here amongour quiet hills. And those he leads seem to be the people we know, themen, and the women, and the boys! He is the hero of a new age. In oldendays he might have been a pioneer, carrying the light of civilisation toa new land; here he has been a sort of moral pioneer--a pioneering farmore difficult than any we have ever known. There are no heroicsconnected with it, the name of the pioneer will not go ringing down theages; for it is a silent leadership and its success is measured byvictories in other lives. We see it now, only too dimly, when he isgone. We reflect sadly that we did not stop to thank him. How busy wewere with our own affairs when he was among us! I wonder is thereanyone here to take up the banner he has laid down!

----I forgot to say that the Scotch Preacher chose the most impressivetext in the Bible for his talk at the funeral:

"He that is greatest among you, let him be . .. As he that doth serve. "

And we came away with a nameless, aching sense of loss, thinking how, perhaps, in a small way, we might do something for somebody else--as theold Doctor did. 

XII

AN EVENING AT HOME

"How calm and quiet a delight Is it, alone, To read and meditate and write, By none offended, and offending none. To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease, And, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease. "

--_Charles Cotton, a friend of Izaak Walton_, 1650

During the last few months so many of the real adventures of life havebeen out of doors and so much of the beauty, too, that I have scarcelywritten a word about my books. In the summer the days are so long andthe work so engrossing that a farmer is quite willing to sit quietly onhis porch after supper and watch the long evenings fall--and rest histired back, and go to bed early. But the winter is the true time forindoor enjoyment!

Days like these! A cold night after a cold day! Well wrapped, you havemade arctic explorations to the stable, the chicken-yard and thepig-pen; you have dug your way energetically to the front gate, stoppingevery few minutes to beat your arms around your shoulders and watch thewhite plume of your breath in the still air--and you have rushed ingladly to the warmth of the dining-room and the lamp-lit supper. Aftersuch a day how sharp your appetite, how good the taste of food!Harriet's brown bread (moist, with thick, sweet, dark crusts) was neverquite so delicious, and when the meal is finished you push back yourchair feeling like a sort of lord. 

"That was a good supper, Harriet, " you say expansively. 

"Was it?" she asks modestly, but with evident pleasure. 

"Cookery, " you remark, "is the greatest art in the world----"

"Oh, you were hungry!"

"Next to poetry, " you conclude, "and much better appreciated. Think howeasy it is to find a poet who will turn you a presentable sonnet, andhow very difficult it is to find a cook who will turn you an ediblebeefsteak----"

I said a good deal more on this subject which I shall not attempt torepeat. Harriet did not listen through it all. She knows what I amcapable of when I really get started; and she has her well-definedlimits. A practical person, Harriet! When I have gone about so far, shebegins clearing the table or takes up her mending--but I don't mind itat all. Having begun talking, it is wonderful how pleasant one's ownvoice becomes. And think of having a clear field--and no interruptions!

My own particular room, where I am permitted to revel in the desert ofmy own disorder, opens comfortably off the sitting-room. A lamp with agreen shade stands invitingly on the table shedding a circle of light onthe books and papers underneath, but leaving all the remainder of theroom in dim pleasantness. At one side stands a comfortable big chairwith everything in arm's reach, including my note books and ink bottle. Where I sit I can look out through the open doorway and see Harriet nearthe fireplace rocking and sewing. Sometimes she hums a little tune whichI never confess to hearing, lest I miss some of the unconsciouscadences. Let the wind blow outside and the snow drift in piles aroundthe doorway and the blinds rattle--I have before me a whole longpleasant evening. 

 * * * * *

What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books!--if youbring to it not the obligations of the student, or look upon it as anopiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of theadventurer! It has vast advantages over the ordinary world of daylight, of barter and trade, of work and worry. In this world every man is hisown King--the sort of King one loves to imagine, not concerned in suchpetty matters as wars and parliaments and taxes, but a mellow andmoderate despot who is a true patron of genius--a mild old chap who hasin his court the greatest men and women in the world--and all of themvying to please the most vagrant of his moods! Invite any one of them totalk, and if your highness is not pleased with him you have only to puthim back in his corner--and bring some jester to sharpen the laughter ofyour highness, or some poet to set your faintest emotion to music!

I have marked a certain servility in books. They entreat you for ahearing: they cry out from their cases--like men, in an eternal strugglefor survival, for immortality. 

"Take me, " pleads this one, "I am responsive to every mood. You willfind in me love and hate, virtue and vice. I don't preach: I give youlife as it is. You will find here adventures cunningly linked withromance and seasoned to suit the most fastidious taste. Try _me_. "

"Hear such talk!" cries his neighbour. "He's fiction. What he says neverhappened at all. He tries hard to make you believe it, but it isn'ttrue, not a word of it. Now, I'm fact. Everything you find in me can bedepended upon. "

"Yes, " responds the other, "but who cares! Nobody wants to read you, you're dull. "

"You're false!"

As their voices grow shriller with argument your highness listens withthe indulgent smile of royalty when its courtiers contend for itsfavour, knowing that their very life depends upon a wrinkle in youraugust brow. 

 * * * * *

As for me I confess to being a rather crusty despot. When Horace wasover here the other evening talking learnedly about silos and ensilage Iadmit that I became the very pattern of humility, but when I take myplace in the throne of my arm-chair with the light from the green-shadedlamp falling on the open pages of my book, I assure you I am decidedlyan autocratic person. My retainers must distinctly keep their places! Ihave my court favourites upon whom I lavish the richest gifts of myattention. I reserve for them a special place in the worn case nearestmy person, where at the mere outreaching of an idle hand I can summonthem to beguile my moods. The necessary slavies of literature I havearranged in indistinct rows at the farther end of the room where theycan be had if I require their special accomplishments. 

 * * * * *

How little, after all, learning counts in this world either in books orin men. I have often been awed by the wealth of information I havediscovered in a man or a book: I have been awed and depressed. Howwonderful, I have thought, that one brain should hold so much, should beso infallible in a world of fallibility. But I have observed how soonand completely such a fount of information dissipates itself. Havingonly things to give, it comes finally to the end of its things: it isempty. What it has hived up so painfully through many a studious yearcomes now to be common property. We pass that way, take our share, anddo not even say "Thank you. " Learning is like money; it is of prodigioussatisfaction to the possessor thereof, but once given forth it diffusesitself swiftly. 

"What have you?" we are ever asking of those we meet. "Information, learning, money?"

We take it cruelly and pass onward, for such is the law of materialpossessions. 

"What have you?" we ask. "Charm, personality, character, the great giftof unexpectedness?"

How we draw you to us! We take you in. Poor or ignorant though you maybe, we link arms and loiter; we love you not for what you have or whatyou give us, but for what you are. 

I have several good friends (excellent people) who act always as Iexpect them to act. There is no flight! More than once I have listenedto the edifying conversation of a certain sturdy old gentleman whom Iknow, and I am ashamed to say that I have thought:

"Lord! if he would jump up now and turn an intellectual handspring, orslap me on the back (figuratively, of course: the other would beunthinkable), or--yes, swear! I--think I could love him. "

But he never does--and I'm afraid he never will!

When I speak then of my books you will know what I mean. The chief charmof literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairlyhear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through thecenturies. How we love 'em! They laughed for themselves, not for us!

Yes, there must be surprise in the books that I keep in the worn case atmy elbow, the surprise of a new personality perceiving for the firsttime the beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness oftruth. It doesn't matter at all whether the writer is a poet, ascientist, a traveller, an essayist or a mere daily space-maker, if hehave the God-given grace of wonder. 

"What on _earth_ are you laughing about?" cries Harriet from thesitting-room. 

When I have caught my breath, I say, holding up my book:

"This absurd man here is telling of the adventures of a certainchivalrous Knight. "

"But I can't see how you can laugh out like that, sitting all alonethere. Why, it's uncanny. "

"You don't know the Knight, Harriet, nor his squire Sancho. "

"You talk of them just as though they were real persons. "

"Real!" I exclaim, "real! Why they are much more real than most of thepeople we know. Horace is a mere wraith compared with Sancho. "

And then I rush out. 

"Let me read you this, " I say, and I read that matchless chapter whereinthe Knight, having clapped on his head the helmet which Sancho hasinadvertently used as a receptacle for a dinner of curds and, sweatingwhey profusely, goes forth to fight two fierce lions. As I proceed withthat prodigious story, I can see Harriet gradually forgetting hersewing, and I read on the more furiously until, coming to the point ofthe conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, having yawned, "threwout some half yard of tongue wherewith he licked and washed his face, "Harriet begins to laugh. 

"There!" I say triumphantly. 

Harriet looks at me accusingly. 

"Such foolishness!" she says. "Why should any man in his senses try tofight caged lions!"

"Harriet, " I say, "you are incorrigible. "

She does not deign to reply, so I return with meekness to my room. 

 * * * * *

The most distressing thing about the ordinary fact writer is hiscock-sureness. Why, here is a man (I have not yet dropped him out ofthe window) who has written a large and sober book explaining life. Anddo you know when he gets through he is apparently much discouraged aboutthis universe. This is the veritable moment when I am in love with myoccupation as a despot! At this moment I will exercise the prerogativeof tyranny:

"Off with his head!"

I do not believe this person though he have ever so many titles tojingle after his name, nor in the colleges which gave them, if theystand sponsor for that which he writes, I do not believe he hascompassed this universe. I believe him to be an inconsequent being likemyself--oh, much more learned, of course--and yet only upon thethreshold of these wonders. It goes too deep--life--to be solved byfifty years of living. There is far too much in the blue firmament, toomany stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain. Weare not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the"scheme of things entire. " This is no place for weak pessimism--thisuniverse. This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fineadventure! What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, areinsignificant compared with that which may be known. 

What this person explains is not, after all, the Universe--but himself, his own limited, faithless personality. I shall not accept hisexplanation. I escape him utterly!

Not long ago, coming in from my fields, I fell to thinking of thesupreme wonder of a tree; and as I walked I met the Professor. 

"How, " I asked, "does the sap get up to the top of these great maplesand elms? What power is there that should draw it upward against theforce of gravity?"

He looked at me a moment with his peculiar slow smile. 

"I don't know, " he said. 

"What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to tell me that science has not solvedthis simplest of natural phenomena?"

"We do not know, " he said. "We explain, but we do not know. "

No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not know--we do not know the why of theflowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not even know why, in our ownhearts, we should be asking this curious question--and other deeperquestions. 

 * * * * *

No man becomes a great writer unless he possesses a highly developedsense of Mystery, of wonder. A great writer is never _blasé_; everythingto him happened not longer ago than this forenoon. 

The other night the Professor and the Scotch Preacher happened in heretogether and we fell to discussing, I hardly know how, for we usuallytalk the neighbourhood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace and ofCharles Baxter, we fell to discussing old Izaak Walton--and the nonsense(as a scientific age knows it to be) which he sometimes talked with suchdelightful sobriety. 

"How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment andprogress of his age, " said the Professor, "when he reads Izaak'sextraordinary natural history. "

"Does it make you feel that way?" asked the Scotch Preacher. "It makesme want to go fishing. "

And he took the old book and turned the leaves until he came to page54. 

"Let me read you, " he said, "what the old fellow says about the'fearfulest of fishes. '"

"'. .. Get secretly behind a tree, and stand asfree from motion as possible; then put a grasshopperon your hook, and let your hook hang a quarter ofa yard short of the water, to which end you must restyour rod on some bough of a tree; but it is likelythat the Chubs will sink down towards the bottomof the water at the first shadow of your rod, for aChub is the fearfulest of fishes, and will do so if buta bird flies over him and makes the least shadowon the water; but they will presently rise up to thetop again, and there lie soaring until some shadowaffrights them again; I say, when they lie upon thetop of the water, look at the best Chub, which you, getting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see, and move your rod as slowly as a snail moves, tothat Chub you intend to catch, let your bait fallgently upon the water three or four inches beforehim, and he will infallibly take the bait, and youwill be as sure to catch him. .. . Go your waypresently, take my rod, and do as I bid you, and Iwill sit down and mend my tackling till you returnback----'"

"Now I say, " said the Scotch Preacher, "that it makes me want to gofishing. "

"That, " I said, "is true of every great book: it either makes us wantto do things, to go fishing, or fight harder or endure morepatiently--or it takes us out of ourselves and beguiles us for a timewith the friendship of completer lives than our own. "

The great books indeed have in them the burning fire of life;

. .. . "nay, they do preserve, as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that livingintellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulousDragon's teeth; which being sown up and down, maychance to spring up armed men. "

How soon we come to distinguish the books of the mere writers from thebooks of real men! For true literature, like happiness, is ever aby-product; it is the half-conscious expression of a man greatly engagedin some other undertaking; it is the song of one working. There issomething inevitable, unrestrainable about the great books; they seemedto come despite the author. "I could not sleep, " says the poet Horace, "for the pressure of unwritten poetry. " Dante said of his books thatthey "made him lean for many days. " I have heard people say of a writerin explanation of his success:

"Oh, well, he has the literary knack. "

It is not so! Nothing is further from the truth. He writes well notchiefly because he is interested in writing, or because he possesses anyespecial knack, but because he is more profoundly, vividly interested inthe activities of life and he tells about them--over his shoulder. Forwriting, like farming, is ever a tool, not an end. 

How the great one-book men remain with us! I can see Marcus Aureliussitting in his camps among the far barbarians writing out thereflections of a busy life. I see William Penn engaged in greatundertakings, setting down "Some of the Fruits of Solitude, " and AbrahamLincoln striking, in the hasty paragraphs written for his speeches, oneof the highest notes in our American literature. 

 * * * * *

"David?"

"Yes, Harriet. "

"I am going up now; it is very late. "

"Yes. "

"You will bank the fire and see that the doors are locked?"

"Yes. "

After a pause: "And, David, I didn't mean--about the story you read. Didthe Knight finally kill the lions?"

"No, " I said with sobriety, "it was not finally necessary. "

"But I thought he set out to kill them. "

"He did; but he proved his valour without doing it. "

Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, but did not do so. 

"Valour"--I began in my hortatory tone, seeing a fair opening, but atthe look in her eye I immediately desisted. 

"You won't stay up late?" she warned. 

"N-o, " I said. 

Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man who forgot himself intoimmortality. How seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, now happilyforgotten! But it was not until he was shut up in jail (some writers Iknow might profit by his example) that he "put aside, " as he said, "amore serious and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's Progress. " It isthe strangest thing in the world--the judgment of men as to what isimportant and serious! Bunyan says in his rhymed introduction:

 "I only thought to makeI knew not what: nor did I undertakeThereby to please my neighbour; no, not I:I did it my own self to gratify. "

Another man I love to have at hand is he who writes of Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, and of The Hairy Ones. 

How Borrow escapes through his books! His object was not to produceliterature but to display his erudition as a master of language and ofoutlandish custom, and he went about the task in all seriousness ofdemolishing the Roman Catholic Church. We are not now so impressed withhis erudition that we do not smile at his vanity and we are quitecontented, even after reading his books, to let the church survive; buthow shall we spare our friend with his inextinguishable love of life, his pugilists, his gypsies, his horse traders? We are even willing toplow through arid deserts of dissertation in order that we may enjoy theperfect oases in which the man forgets himself!

Reading such books as these and a hundred others, the books of the worncase at my elbow. 

"The bulged and the bruised octavos, The dear and the dumpy twelves----"

I become like those initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries who, asCicero tells us, have attained "the art of living joyfully and of dyingwith a fairer hope. "

 * * * * *

It is late, and the house is still. A few bright embers glow in thefireplace. You look up and around you, as though coming back to theworld from some far-off place. The clock in the dining-room ticks withsolemn precision; you did not recall that it had so loud a tone. It hasbeen a great evening, in this quiet room on your farm, you have beenable to entertain the worthies of all the past!

You walk out, resoundingly, to the kitchen and open the door. You lookacross the still white fields. Your barn looms black in the neardistance, the white mound close at hand is your wood-pile, the greattrees stand like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has drifted upon thedoorstep and lies there untracked. It is, indeed, a dim and untrackedworld: coldly beautiful but silent--and of a strange unreality! Youclose the door with half a shiver and take the real world with you up tobed. For it is past one o'clock. 

[Illustration: "The beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, thegreatness of truth"]

XIII

THE POLITICIAN

In the city, as I now recall it (having escaped), it seemed to be theinstinctive purpose of every citizen I knew not to get into politics butto keep out. We sedulously avoided caucuses and school-meetings, ourtime was far too precious to be squandered in jury service, we forgot toregister for elections, we neglected to vote. We observed a sort ofaristocratic contempt for political activity and then fretted and fumedover the low estate to which our government had fallen--and never sawthe humour of it all. 

At one time I experienced a sort of political awakening: a "boss" wehad was more than ordinarily piratical. I think he had a scheme to stealthe city hall and sell the monuments in the park (something of thatsort), and I, for one, was disturbed. For a time I really wanted to beara man's part in helping to correct the abuses, only I did not know howand could not find out. 

In the city, when one would learn anything about public matters, heturns, not to life, but to books or newspapers. What we get in the cityis not life, but what someone else tells us about life. So I acquired areally formidable row of works on Political Economy and Government (Iadmire the word "works" in that application) where I found Society laidout for me in the most perfect order--with pennies on its eyes. Howoften, looking back, I see myself as in those days, read my learnedbooks with a sort of fury of interest!--

From the reading of books I acquired a sham comfort. Dwelling upon theexcellent theory of our institutions, I was content to disregard therealities of daily practice. I acquired a mock assurance under which Iproceeded complacently to the polls, and cast my vote without knowing asingle man on the ticket, what he stood for, or what he really intendedto do. The ceremony of the ballot bears to politics much therelationship that the sacrament bears to religion: how often, observingthe formality, we yet depart wholly from the spirit of the institution. 

It was good to escape that place of hurrying strangers. It was good toget one's feet down into the soil. It was good to be in a place wherethings _are_ because they _grow_, and politics, not less than corn! Oh, my friend, say what you please, argue how you like, this crowdingtogether of men and women in unnatural surroundings, this haste to berich in material things, this attempt to enjoy without production, thisremoval from first-hand life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin. If our cities were not recruited constantly with the fresh, clean bloodof the country, with boys who still retain some of the power and thevision drawn from the soil, where would they be!

"We're a great people, " says Charles Baxter, "but we don't always workat it. "

"But we talk about it, " says the Scotch Preacher. 

"By the way, " says Charles Baxter, "have you seen George Warren? He's upfor supervisor. "

"I haven't yet. "

"Well, go around and see him. We must find out exactly what he intendsto do with the Summit Hill road. If he is weak on that we'd better lookto Matt Devine. At least Matt is safe. "

The Scotch Preacher looked at Charles Baxter and said to me with a noteof admiration in his voice:

"Isn't this man Baxter getting to be intolerable as a political boss!"

 * * * * *

Baxter's shop! Baxter's shop stands close to the road and just in theedge of a grassy old apple orchard. It is a low, unpainted building, with generous double doors in front, standing irresistibly open as yougo by. Even as a stranger coming here first from the city I felt thecall of Baxter's shop. Shall I ever forget! It was a still morning--oneof those days of warm sunshine--and perfect quiet in the country--andbirds in the branches--and apple trees all in bloom. Baxter whistlingat his work in the sunlit doorway of his shop, in his long, faded apron, much worn at the knees. He was bending to the rhythmic movement of hisplane, and all around him as he worked rose billows of shavings. And oh, the odours of that shop! the fragrant, resinous odour of new-cut pine, the pungent smell of black walnut, the dull odour of oak wood--how theystole out in the sunshine, waylaying you as you came far up the road, beguiling you as you passed the shop, and stealing reproachfully afteryou as you went onward down the road. 

Never shall I forget that grateful moment when I first passed Baxter'sshop--a failure from the city--and Baxter looking out at me from hisdeep, quiet, gray eyes--eyes that were almost a caress!

My wayward feet soon took me, unintroduced, within the doors of thatshop, the first of many visits. And I can say no more in appreciation ofmy ventures there than that I came out always with more than I had whenI went in. 

The wonders there! The long bench with its huge-jawed wooden vises, andthe little dusty windows above looking out into the orchard, and thebrown planes and the row of shiny saws, and the most wonderful patternsquares and triangles and curves, each hanging on its own peg; andabove, in the rafters, every sort and size of curious wood. And oh! theold bureaus and whatnots and high-boys in the corners waiting their turnto be mended; and the sticky glue-pot waiting, too, on the end of thesawhorse. There is family history here in this shop--no end of it--thesmall and yet great (because intensely human) tragedies and humours ofthe long, quiet years among these sunny hills. That whatnot there, theone of black walnut with the top knocked off, that belonged in the olddays to----

"Charles Baxter, " calls my friend Patterson from the roadway, "can youfix my cupboard?"

"Bring it in, " says Charles Baxter, hospitably, and Patterson brings itin, and stops to talk--and stops--and stops--There is great talk inBaxter's shop--the slow-gathered wisdom of the country, the lore ofcrops and calves and cabinets. In Baxter's shop we choose the nextPresident of these United States!

You laugh! But we do--exactly that. It is in the Baxters' shops (not inBroadway, not in State Street) where the presidents are decided upon. Inthe little grocery stores you and I know, in the blacksmithies, in theschoolhouses back in the country!

 * * * * *

Forgive me! I did not intend to wander away. I meant to keep to mysubject--but the moment I began to talk of politics in the country I wasbeset by a compelling vision of Charles Baxter coming out of his shop inthe dusk of the evening, carrying his curious old reflector lamp andleading the way down the road to the schoolhouse. And thinking of thelamp brought a vision of the joys of Baxter's shop, and thinking of theshop brought me naturally around to politics and presidents; and here Iam again where I started!

Baxter's lamp is, somehow, inextricably associated in my mind withpolitics. Being busy farmers, we hold our caucuses and other meetings inthe evening and usually in the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse isconveniently near to Baxter's shop, so we gather at Baxter's shop. Baxter takes his lamp down from the bracket above his bench, reflectorand all, and you will see us, a row of dusky figures, Baxter in thelead, proceeding down the roadway to the schoolhouse. Having arrived, some one scratches a match, shields it with his hand (I see yet thesudden fitful illumination of the brown-bearded, watchful faces of myneighbours!) and Baxter guides us into the schoolhouse--with its shut-industy odours of chalk and varnished desks and--yes, leftover lunches!

Baxter's lamp stands on the table, casting a vast shadow of the chairmanon the wall. 

"Come to order, " says the chairman, and we have here at this moment inoperation the greatest institution in this round world: the institutionof free self-government. Great in its simplicity, great in itsunselfishness! And Baxter's old lamp with its smoky tin reflector, isnot that the veritable torch of our liberties?

This, I forgot to say, though it makes no special difference--a caucuswould be the same--is a school meeting. 

You see, ours is a prolific community. When a young man and a youngwoman are married they think about babies; they want babies, and whatis more, they have them! and love them afterward! It is a part of thecomplete life. And having babies, there must be a place to teach them tolive. 

Without more explanation you will understand that we needed an additionto our schoolhouse. A committee reported that the amount required wouldbe $800. We talked it over. The Scotch Preacher was there with a planwhich he tacked up on the blackboard and explained to us. He told us ofseeing the stone-mason and the carpenter, he told us what the seatswould cost, and the door knobs and the hooks in the closet. We are acareful people; we want to know where every penny goes!

"If we put it all in the budget this year what will that make the rate?"inquires a voice from the end of the room. 

We don't look around; we know the voice. And when the secretary hascomputed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz ofmultiplications and additions which is going on in each man's head as hecalculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes onhis farm, his daughter's piano his wife's top-buggy. 

And many a man is saying to himself:

"If we build this addition to the schoolhouse, I shall have to give upthe new overcoat I have counted upon, or Amanda won't be able to get thenew cooking-range. "

That's _real_ politics: the voluntary surrender of some private good forthe upbuilding of some community good. It is in such exercises that thefibre of democracy grows sound and strong. There is, after all, in thisworld no real good for which we do not have to surrender something. Inthe city the average voter is never conscious of any surrender. He neverrealises that he is giving anything himself for good schools or goodstreets. Under such conditions how can you expect self-government? Noservice, no reward!

The first meeting that I sat through watching those bronzed farmers atwork gave me such a conception of the true meaning of self-government asI never hoped to have. 

"This is the place where I belong, " I said to myself. 

It was wonderful in that school meeting to see how every essentialelement of our government was brought into play. Finance? We discussedwhether we should put the entire $800 into the next year's budget ordivide it paying part in cash and bonding the district for theremainder. The question of credit, of interest, of the obligations ofthis generation and the next, were all discussed. At one time long ago Iwas amazed when I heard my neighbours arguing in Baxter's shop about theissuance of certain bonds by the United States government: howcompletely they understood it! I know now where they got thatunderstanding. Right in the school meetings and town caucuses where theyraise money yearly for the expenses of our small government! There isnothing like it in the city. 

The progress of a people can best be judged by those things which theyaccept as matters-of-fact. It was amazing to me, coming from the city, and before I understood, to see how ingrained had become some of theprinciples which only a few years ago were fiercely-mooted problems. Itgave me a new pride in my country, a new appreciation of the steps incivilisation which we have already permanently gained. Not a questionhave I ever heard in any school meeting of the necessity of educatingevery American child--at any cost. Think of it! Think how far we havecome in that respect, in seventy--yes, fifty--years. Universal educationhas become a settled axiom of our life. 

And there was another point--so common now that we do not appreciate thesignificance of it. I refer to majority rule. In our school meeting wewere voting money out of men's pockets--money that we all needed forprivate expenses--and yet the moment the minority, after full and honestdiscussion, failed to maintain its contention in opposition to the newbuilding, it yielded with perfect good humour and went on with thediscussion of other questions. When you come to think of it, in thelight of history, is not that a wonderful thing?

One of the chief property owners in our neighbourhood is a rathercrabbed old bachelor. Having no children and heavy taxes to pay, helooks with jaundiced eye on additions to schoolhouses. He will objectand growl and growl and object, and yet pin him down as I have seen theScotch Preacher pin him more than once, he will admit that children ("ofcourse, " he will say, "certainly, of course") must be educated. 

"For the good of bachelors as well as other people?" the ScotchPreacher will press it home. 

"Certainly, of course. "

And when the final issue comes, after full discussion, after he hastried to lop off a few yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks ordispense with the clothes-closet, he votes for the addition with therest of us. 

It is simply amazing to see how much grows out of these discussions--howmuch of that social sympathy and understanding which is the verytap-root of democracy. It's cheaper to put up a miserable shack of anaddition. Why not do it? So we discuss architecture--blindly, it istrue; we don't know the books on the subject--but we grope for the bigtrue things, and by our own discussion we educate ourselves to know whya good building is better than a bad one. Heating and ventilation intheir relation to health, the use of "fad studies"--how I have heardthose things discussed!

How Dr. North, who has now left us forever, shone in those meetings, andCharles Baxter and the Scotch Preacher--broad men, every one--how theyhave explained and argued, with what patience have they brought intothat small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles Baxter's lamp, the grandestconceptions of human society--not in the big words of the books, but inthe simple, concrete language of our common life. 

"Why teach physiology?"

What a talk Dr. North once gave us on that!

"Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one can be had for $30?"

You should have heard the Scotch Preacher answer that question! Many aone of us went away with some of the education which we had come, somewhat grudgingly, to buy for our children. 

These are our political bosses: these unknown patriots, who preach theinvisible patriotism which expresses itself not in flags and oratory, but in the quiet daily surrender of private advantage to the publicgood. 

There is, after all, no such thing as perfect equality; there must beleaders, flag-bearers, bosses--whatever you call them. Some men have agenius for leading; others for following; each is necessary anddependent upon the other. In cities, that leadership is often pervertedand used to evil ends. Neither leaders nor followers seem tounderstand. In its essence politics is merely a mode of expressing humansympathy. In the country many and many a leader like Baxter worksfaithfully year in and year out, posting notices of caucuses, schoolmeetings and elections, opening cold schoolhouses, talking tocandidates, prodding selfish voters--and mostly without reward. Occasionally they are elected to petty offices where they do far morework than they are paid for (we have our eyes on 'em); often they arerewarded by the power and place which leadership gives them among theirneighbours, and sometimes--and that is Charles Baxter's case--theysimply like it! Baxter is of the social temperament: it is the naturalexpression of his personality. As for thinking of himself as a patriot, he would never dream of it. Work with the hands, close touch with thecommon life of the soil, has given him much of the true wisdom ofexperience. He knows us and we know him; he carries the banner, holds itas high as he knows how, and we follow. 

Whether there can be a real democracy (as in a city) where there is notthat elbow knowledge, that close neighbourhood sympathy, that conscioussurrender of little personal goods for bigger public ones, I don't know. 

We haven't many foreigners in our district, but all three were there onthe night we voted for the addition. They are Polish. Each has a farmwhere the whole family works--and puts on a little more Americanism eachyear. They're good people. It is surprising how much all these Poles, Italians, Germans and others, are like us, how perfectly human they are, when we know them personally! One Pole here, named Kausky, I have cometo know pretty well, and I declare I have forgotten that he _is_ a Pole. There's nothing like the rub of democracy! The reason why we are sosuspicious of the foreigners in our cities is that they are crowdedtogether in such vast, unknown, undigested masses. We have swallowedthem too fast, and we suffer from a sort of national dyspepsia. 

Here in the country we promptly digest our foreigners and they make asgood Americans as anybody. 

"Catch a foreigner when he first comes here, " says Charles Baxter, "andhe takes to our politics like a fish to water. "

The Scotch Preacher says they "gape for education, " And when I seeKausky's six children going by in the morning to school, all theirround, sleepy, fat faces shining with soap, I believe it! Baxter tellswith humour how he persuaded Kausky to vote for the addition to theschoolhouse. It was a pretty stiff tax for the poor fellow to pay, butBaxter "figgered children with him, " as he said. With six to educate, Baxter showed him that he was actually getting a good deal more than hepaid for!

Be it far from me to pretend that we are always right or that we havearrived in our country at the perfection of self-government. I do notwish to imply that all of our people are interested, that all attend thecaucuses and school-meetings (some of the most prominent never comenear--they stay away, and if things don't go right they blame CharlesBaxter!) Nor must I over-emphasise the seriousness of our publicinterest. But we certainly have here, if anywhere in this nation, realself-government. Growth is a slow process. We often fail in our electionof delegates to State conventions; we sometimes vote wrong in nationalaffairs. It is an easy thing to think school district; difficult, indeed, to think State or nation. But we grow. When we make mistakes, it is not because we are evil, but because we don't know. Once we get aclear understanding of the right or wrong of any question you can dependupon us--absolutely--to vote for what is right. With more education weshall be able to think in larger and larger circles--until we become, finally, really national in our interests and sympathies. Whenever a mancomes along who knows how simple we are, and how much we really want todo right, if we can be convinced that a thing _is_ right--who explainshow the railroad question, for example, affects us in our intimate dailylives, what the rights and wrongs of it are, why, we can understand anddo understand--and we are ready to act. 

It is easy to rally to a flag in times of excitement. The patriotism ofdrums and marching regiments is cheap; blood is material and cheap;physical weariness and hunger are cheap. But the struggle I speak of isnot cheap. It is dramatised by few symbols. It deals with hiddenspiritual qualities within the conscience of men. Its heroes are yetunsung and unhonoured. No combats in all the world's history were everfought so high upward in the spiritual air as these; and, surely, notfor nothing!

And so, out of my experience both in city and country, I feel--yes, I_know_--that the real motive power of this democracy lies back in thelittle country neighbourhoods like ours where men gather in dimschoolhouses and practice the invisible patriotism of surrender andservice. 

XIV

THE HARVEST

"Oh, Universe, what thou wishest, I wish. "

--_Marcus Aurelius_

I come to the end of these Adventures with a regret I can scarcelyexpress. I, at least, have enjoyed them. I began setting them down withno thought of publication, but for my own enjoyment; the possibility ofa book did not suggest itself until afterwards. I have tried to relatethe experiences of that secret, elusive, invisible life which in everyman is so far more real, so far more important than his visibleactivities--the real expression of a life much occupied in otheremployment. 

When I first came to this farm, I came empty-handed. I was the veritablepattern of the city-made failure. I believed that life had nothing morein store for me. I was worn out physically, mentally and, indeed, morally. I had diligently planned for Success; and I had reaped defeat. I came here without plans. I plowed and harrowed and planted, expectingnothing. In due time I began to reap. And it has been a growing marvelto me, the diverse and unexpected crops that I have produced withinthese uneven acres of earth. With sweat I planted corn, and I have herea crop not only of corn but of happiness and hope. My tilled fields havemiraculously sprung up to friends!

This book is one of the unexpected products of my farm. It is this waywith the farmer. After the work of planting and cultivating, after therain has fallen in his fields, after the sun has warmed them, after thenew green leaves have broken the earth--one day he stands looking outwith a certain new joy across his acres (the wind bends and half turnsthe long blades of the corn) and there springs up within him a song ofthe fields. No matter how little poetic, how little articulate he is, the song rises irrepressibly in his heart, and he turns aside from histask with a new glow of fulfillment and contentment. At harvest time inour country I hear, or I imagine I hear, a sort of chorus rising overall the hills, and I meet no man who is not, deep down within him, asinger! So song follows work: so art grows out of life!

And the friends I have made! They have come to me naturally, as the corngrows in my fields or the wind blows in my trees. Some strange potencyabides within the soil of this earth! When two men stoop (there must bestooping) and touch it together, a magnetic current is set up betweenthem: a flow of common understanding and confidence. I would call theattention of all great Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians to thisphenomenon: it will repay investigation. It is at once the rarest andthe commonest thing I know. It shows that down deep within us, where wereally live, we are all a good deal alike. We have much the sameinstincts, hopes, joys, sorrows. If only it were not for the outwardthings that we commonly look upon as important (which are in reality notat all important) we might come together without fear, vanity, envy, orprejudice and be friends. And what a world it would be! If civilisationmeans anything at all it means the increasing ability of men to lookthrough material possessions, through clothing, through differences ofspeech and colour of skin, and to see the genuine man that abides withineach of us. It means an escape from symbols!

I tell this merely to show what surprising and unexpected things havegrown out of my farm. All along I have had more than I bargained for. From now on I shall marvel at nothing! When I ordered my own life Ifailed; now that I work from day to day, doing that which I can do bestand which most delights me, I am rewarded in ways that I could not haveimagined. Why, it would not surprise me if heaven were at the end of allthis!

Now, I am not so foolish as to imagine that a farm is a perfect place. In these Adventures I have emphasised perhaps too forcibly the joyfuland pleasant features of my life. In what I have written I havenaturally chosen only those things which were most interesting andcharming. My life has not been without discouragement and loss andloneliness (loneliness most of all). I have enjoyed the hard work; thelittle troubles have troubled me more than the big ones. I detestunharnessing a muddy horse in the rain! I don't like chickens in thebarn. And somehow Harriet uses an inordinate amount of kindling wood. But once in the habit, unpleasant things have a way of fading quicklyand quietly from the memory. 

And you see after living so many years in the city the worst experienceon the farm is a sort of joy!

In most men as I come to know them--I mean men who dare to lookthemselves in the eye--I find a deep desire for more naturalness, moredirectness. How weary we all grow of this fabric of deception which iscalled modern life. How passionately we desire to escape but cannot seethe way! How our hearts beat with sympathy when we find a man who hasturned his back upon it all and who says "I will live it no longer. " Howwe flounder in possessions as in a dark and suffocating bog, wastingour energies not upon life but upon _things_. Instead of employing ourhouses, our cities, our gold, our clothing, we let these inanimatethings possess and employ us--to what utter weariness. "Blessed benothing, " sighs a dear old lady of my knowledge. 

Of all ways of escape I know, the best, though it is far fromperfection, is the farm. There a man may yield himself most nearly tothe quiet and orderly processes of nature. He may attain most nearly tothat equilibrium between the material and spiritual, with time for theexactions of the first, and leisure for the growth of the second, whichis the ideal of life. 

In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered thedisadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from oneanother and from markets, they have had little to stimulate themintellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and familieswere often developed at the expense of a friendly community life:neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with therigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidlychanging. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery ofmails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my laneat noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country trolleys, moreschools and churches, and cheaper railroad rates, have all helped tobring the farmer's life well within the stimulating currents of worldthought without robbing it of its ancient advantages. And thoseadvantages are incalculable: Time first for thought and reflection(narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom ofaction--which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who hashis feet firmly planted upon his own land. 

A city hammers and polishes its denizens into a defined model: itworships standardisation; but the country encourages differentiation, itloves new types. Thus it is that so many great and original men havelived their youth upon the land. It would be impossible to imagineAbraham Lincoln brought up in a street of tenements. Family life on thefarm is highly educative; there is more discipline for a boy in thecontinuous care of a cow or a horse than in many a term of school. Industry, patience, perseverance are qualities inherent in the veryatmosphere of country life. The so-called manual training of cityschools is only a poor makeshift for developing in the city boy thosehabits which the country boy acquires naturally in his daily life. Anhonest, hard-working country training is the best inheritance a fathercan leave his son. 

And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a tool. A cornfield, a plow, awoodpile, an oak tree, will cure no man unless he have it in himself tobe cured. The truth is that no life, and least of all a farmer's life, is simple--unless it is simple. I know a man and his wife who came outhere to the country with the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith, simple. They were unable to keep the chickens out of their summerkitchen. They discovered microbes in the well, and mosquitoes in thecistern, and wasps in the garret. Owing to the resemblance of the seeds, their radishes turned out to be turnips! The last I heard of them theywere living snugly in a flat in Sixteenth Street--all their troublessolved by a dumb-waiter. 

The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a manis in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place ofall places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where hecan _grow_. The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it oftendestroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces, the desire for the higher life which animates every good man. 

While on the subject of simplicity it may be well to observe thatsimplicity does not necessarily, as some of those who escape from thecity seem to think, consist in doing without things, but rather in theproper use of things. One cannot return, unless with affectation, to thecrudities of a former existence. We do not believe in Diogenes and histub. Do you not think the good Lord has given us the telephone (that wemay better reach that elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the highest ofhuman ideals) and the railroad (that we may widen our human knowledgeand sympathy)--and even the motor-car? (though, indeed, I have sometimesimagined that the motor-cars passing this way had a different origin!). He may have given these things to us too fast, faster than we can bear;but is that any reason why we should denounce them all and return tothe old, crude, time-consuming ways of our ancestors? I am noreactionary. I do not go back. I neglect no tool of progress. I am tooeager to know every wonder in this universe. The motor-car, if I hadone, could not carry me fast enough! I must yet fly!

After my experience in the country, if I were to be cross-examined as tothe requisites of a farm, I should say that the chief thing to bedesired in any sort of agriculture, is good health in the farmer. What, after all, can touch that! How many of our joys that we thinkintellectual are purely physical! This joy of the morning that the poetcarols about so cheerfully, is often nothing more than the exuberanceproduced by a good hot breakfast. Going out of my kitchen door somemornings and standing for a moment, while I survey the green andspreading fields of my farm, it seems to me truly as if all nature weremaking a bow to me. It seems to me that there never was a better cowthan mine, never a more really perfect horse, and as for pigs, could anyin this world herald my approach with more cheerful gruntings andsquealings!

But there are other requisites for a farm. It must not be too large, else it will keep you away from your friends. Provide a town not too faroff (and yet not too near) where you can buy your flour and sell yourgrain. If there is a railroad convenient (though not so near that thewhistling of the engines reaches you), that is an added advantage. Demand a few good old oak trees, or walnuts, or even elms will do. Nowell-regulated farm should be without trees; and having secured theoaks--buy your fuel of your neighbours. Thus you will be blessed withbeauty both summer and winter. 

As for neighbours, accept those nearest at hand; you will find themsurprisingly human, like yourself. If you like them you will besurprised to find how much they all like you (and will upon occasionlend you a spring-tooth harrow or a butter tub, or help you with yourplowing); but if you hate them they will return your hatred withinterest. I have discovered that those who travel in pursuit of betterneighbours never find them. 

Somewhere on every farm, along with the other implements, there shouldbe a row of good books, which should not be allowed to rust withdisuse: a book, like a hoe, grows brighter with employment. And no farm, even in this country where we enjoy the even balance of the seasons, rain and shine, shine and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation fromthe currents of the world's thought which is so essential to thecomplete life. From the papers which the postman puts in the box flowthe true waters of civilisation. You will find within their columns howto be good or how to make pies: you will get out of them what you lookfor! And finally, down the road from your farm, so that you can hear thebell on Sunday mornings, there should be a little church. It will do yougood even though, like me, you do not often attend. It's a sort of Arkof the Covenant; and when you get to it, you will find therein the TrueSpirit--if you take it with you when you leave home. Of course you willlook for good land and comfortable buildings when you buy your farm:they are, indeed, prime requisites. I have put them last for the reasonthat they are so often first. I have observed, however, that the joy ofthe farmer is by no means in proportion to the area of his arable land. It is often a nice matter to decide between acres and contentment: menperish from too much as well as from too little. And if it be possiblethere should be a long table in the dining-room and little chairs aroundit, and small beds upstairs, and young voices calling at their play inthe fields--if it be possible. 

Sometimes I say to myself: I have grasped happiness! Here it is; I haveit. And yet, it always seems at that moment of complete fulfillment asthough my hand trembled, that I might not take it!

I wonder if you recall the story of Christian and Hopeful, how, standingon the hill Clear (as we do sometimes--at our best) they looked for thegates of the Celestial City (as we look--how fondly!):

"Then they essayed to look, but the remembranceof that last thing that the shepherds had showed themmade their hands shake, by means of which impedimentthey could not look steadily through the glass:yet they thought they saw something like the gate, andalso some of the glory of the place. "

How often I have thought that I saw some of the glory of the place(looking from the hill Clear) and how often, lifting the glass, my handhas trembled!