Yet she went on drawing one happy breath after another, until she died, and my father knew his first unhappiness when she departed.
But when I meet people who laugh at lineage and genealogy, I do not speak of the Durbans at all. I say, “Yes, pride of lineage is foolish. The Vernons have been plain country folk ever since they came over in 1639, and not one of them was ever celebrated for anything—not even for his wickedness. They’ve just been Yankee countrymen, and so, of course, pride of ancestry is a foolish thing.”
Whenever you hear a man laughing at pride of ancestry, you may be sure that his ancestors were no better than my fathers were. But if he is always talking about his ancestry, depend upon it, he has something back of him as good as the Durbans, and his forbears looked down on farmers.
We worked until the whistles at Egerton blew for noon, and I had by that time devastated quite a patch of grass.
Windham had been busy in other places all the morning, and when he came to look at what I had done he made no reference to the thrift of the Germans. He looked at the regular patches of spared blades that were holding their heads high amidst the blades that had fallen so bravely, and said,
“How would you like to drive the rake this afternoon?”
I blushed and said that I believed that would be a change of work.
I did not laugh at the somewhat amateur raking of Ethel and Cherry. Hay-making is an art, and beginners learn better by encouragement than by ridicule.
We had brought our lunch, and we picnicked under the spreading branches of an oak, and found that we were feeling “pretty good.” And we had six red arms to our credit—four of them pretty.