And to-morrow was. We rose and breakfasted early and found when we looked at the thermometer that it was already 78, but there was a west wind blowing to temper the heat.
“They’re already at work, aren’t they?” said Cherry as we started out, the women clad in walking skirts and shirt-waists and broad-brimmed hats, and I bare headed and outing shirted.
“My dear child, they have been at work for the last four hours.”
I had told Windham what to expect, and when he saw us coming he said, “That’s right. The more the merrier. You’ll find rakes there by the fence.”
I told him that I would mow a little, as I had done it when a boy.
“Good work,” said he, and let me take his own scythe while he drove a loaded wagon home.
I started in at a field that they had not intended to attack until after lunch, but Windham said it would make no difference. Ethel and Cherry raked as if they were sweeping, and I am not sure that their money value could have been represented by any undue use of figures. I vaulted the fence and began my fell work, taking care to keep close to the edge and demolishing every last blade of grass. I also found that my method of attack spared a little mouthful of grass at each stroke, and when I had gone down the length of the field and had stuck the point of the scythe in the earth twice, and had cut the end off of a stone, and had lunged into the fence, I determined to rest a minute and try to recall the proper way in which to hold the scythe.
The way back was easier, as I was now one remove from the fence. I poised the scythe in such a manner that I reaped what I had before spared, but found, upon looking back over the path by which I had come, that I had spared a few inches in each swathe. I seemed to be unable to make a long, clean sweep. And my back felt like breaking and I was sweating in a manner unbecoming a gentleman.
That, however, did not worry me at all, as I reflected that on my father’s side I was the first gentleman that had appeared in America for nine generations—all the rest had been of the bone and sinew of the nation.
When people talk about pride of ancestry in my hearing, and their pride of ancestry is based on the fact that they have had fine blood in their veins for generations, I inflate my chest and tell them about my maternal ancestors, the Durbans. Not a man did a stroke of work for eight generations, and they lived in cities and looked down on country folk in a manner that was as aristocratic as could be. When my mother married my father, who had been born and bred a country boy, all the Durbans held up their hands in holy horror and said that my mother would never draw a happy breath again.