Out in the berry patch he talked over the neighborhood affairs and picked berries and killed mosquitoes, while the wind wandered by with rustling steps on the lombardy poplar leaves. The locusts sang and the grasshoppers snapped their shining wings. It was a blessed relief to his troubled older self, for he slipped back into the more tranquil life of his boyhood.
At supper he sat at the table with the men, whose wet shirts showed how fierce the work of pitching the hay had been.
"Be ye out f'r play or work, Brad?" asked Councill.
"Work. Need a hand?"
"They's plenty to do—but I'm afraid you can't take a hand's place, for a while."
"Try me and see."
They were all curious to hear of Washington, but he was more inclined to talk of the crops and the cattle.
He went to sleep that night in the bare garret with the men, and woke the next morning at sun-rise at sound of Councill's voice calling him, just as he used to do when he was a hired man.
He went down to breakfast, sloshed his face at the cistern pump and was ready to eat when the men came in.