Could the old ploughman still carry in his heart the roots of so deep-seated a passion?
At eleven o'clock there was another halt and another prayer; the horse was unhitched and received a bundle of clover for his dinner. Ivo and Nat sat down at the edge of the field, in what would have been a fence-corner if there were fences in that part of Germany, and waited for Mag, who soon appeared with their dinner. They ate out of one bowl, with a good appetite, for they had worked hard. The bowl was so entirely empty that Mag said,--
"There'll be fine weather to-morrow: you make the platter clean."
"Yes," said Nat, turning the bowl upside down; "you couldn't drown a wasp there."
After dinner they took a little siesta. Ivo, stretched out at full length, was listening to the many-voiced chirpings among the clover; and, closing his eyes, he said,--
"It is just as if the whole field were alive, and as if all the flowers were singing,--and the larks up there,--and the crickets----" He never finished the sentence, for he had fallen asleep. Nat looked at him for some time with an expression of delight; then he brought a few sticks, fixed them carefully into the ground, and hung the cloth in which the clover had been tied over them, so that the boy slept in the shade. This done, he got up softly, hitched the horse to the plough, and went on noiselessly with his work.
It would be hard to tell whether he kept down the songs which mounted to his lips, or whether solemn thoughts made him so quiet. The dun was very true to the rein, and a slight jerk was enough, without a word, to keep the furrow straight.
The sun was sinking when Ivo awoke. He tore away the tent which was stretched over him, and looked about him in wonder, not knowing, for a while, where he was. On seeing Nat he bounded toward him with a shout of joy. He helped Nat to finish the job, and was almost sorry to find that Nat had managed to plough without him; for he would fain have thought himself indispensable to the progress of the work.
At nightfall they quitted the field, leaving the plough behind them. Nat lifted Ivo on the horse, and walked by his side up the hill; but, suddenly remembering that he had left his knife where the plough was, he ran back hastily, and thus found himself again in the valley. Looking up, he saw the sun set magnificently behind two mountains draped in pine woods. Like the choir of a church built all of light and gold were earth and sky; the treasures of eternity seemed to blink into time; long streamers of all shades of red and purple floated about; the little cloudlets were like, angels' heads; while in the midst was a large, solemn mass of vapor like a vast altar of blue pedestal covered with a cloth of flame. The sight provoked a wish to rise upward and melt in rapture, and again an expectation to behold the bursting of the cloud and the coming forth of the Lord in his glory to proclaim the millennial reign of peace.