“Well, come down to hard facts, and how many of us will have to admit that we have feelings like that at times? There is still a good share of the primitive man left in our natures. We’re not saints. Why, even the churches that believe in saints don’t canonize mortals until they have been a hundred years dead--they want to be sure they are dead and their mortal weaknesses forgotten.”
Amanda laughed. A moment later they turned from the country road and followed a narrower path that was bordered on one side by green fields and on the other by a strip of woods, an irregular arm reaching out from Amanda’s moccasin haunt. The road led up-hill at a sharp angle, so that when the traveler reached the top, panting and tired, there stretched before him in delightful panorama a view of Lancaster County that more than compensated for the discomfort and effort of the climb.
Amanda and Martin stood facing that sight. Behind them lay the cool, tree-clad hill, before them the blue August sky looked down on Lancaster County farms, whose houses and red barns seemed dropped like kindergarten toys into the midst of undulating green fields. One could sit or stand under the sheltering shade of the trees along the edge of the woods and yet look up to the sky or out upon the Garden Spot and farther off, to the blue, hazy mountain ridge that touched the sky-line and cut off the view of what lay beyond.
Martin threw the pillows on the ground and they sat down in the cool shade.
“Can anything beat this?” he asked lazily as he ruffled the dry leaves about him with his hands. “You know, Amanda, I could never understand why, with my love for outdoors, I can’t be a farmer. When I was a boy I used to consider it the natural thing for me to do as my father did. I did help him, but I never liked the work. You couldn’t coax the other boys to the city; they’d rather pitch hay or plant corn. And yet I like nothing better than to be out in the open. During the summer I’m out in the garden after I come home from the city, and that much of working the soil I like, but for a steady job--not for me!”
“It’s best to do work one likes,” said the girl. “Not every person who likes outdoors was meant to be a farmer. Be glad you like to be out in the open. But I can’t conceive of any person not liking it. I could sit and look at the sky for one whole day. It’s so encouraging. Sometimes when I walk home from school after a hard day and I look down on the road and think over the problems of handling certain trying children so as to get the best out of them and the latent best in them developed, I look up all of a sudden and the sky is so wonderful that, somehow, my troubles seem trivial. It’s just as though the sky were saying, ’Child, you’ve been looking down so long and worrying about little things that you’ve forgotten that the sky is blue and the clouds are still sailing over you.’ And, Martin, don’t you like the stars? I never get tired of looking at them. I never care to gaze at the full moon unless there are clouds sailing over her. She’s too big and brazen, too compelling. But the twinkle of the stars and the sudden flashing out of dim ones you didn’t see at first always makes me feel like singing. Ever feel that way?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t put it all into words like that.”
“Ah,” he thought, “she has the mind of a poet, the heart of a child, the soul of a woman.”
“I read somewhere,” she went on, as though certain of his understanding and sharing her mood, “that the Pagans said man was made to stand upright so that he might raise his face to heaven and his eyes to the stars. Somehow, it seems those old Pagans had a finer conception of many vital truths than some of us have in this age.”
“That’s true. We have them beaten in many ways, but when we come across a thing like that we stop to think and wonder where they got it. I always did like mythology. Pandora and her box, Clytie and her emblem of constancy, and Ulysses--what schoolboy escaped the thrills of Ulysses? I bet you pitied Orpheus!”