"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."
I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure, longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."
"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work. I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....
"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?... Oh, no,—for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be assailed by all hands....
"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you've started something."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."
"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."
I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....
That fall the National Magazine printed The Threshers and The Harvest and The Cook-Shack, three poems, the fruit of that work. All three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.