“What a good face it is!” thought Eunice, as she watched it—“a true friend’s face!”
It was a good face, strong and kindly—a face to inspire confidence. It was brown and weather-beaten, and showed many wrinkles, and the soft waving hair above it was as white as snow. But it was not an old face. The eyes were soft and bright, and the smile that came and went so readily upon it gave it a look of youth. Eunice could not remember the time when he had not been good and kind to her, and she loved him dearly. But she was a little afraid of him to-day. In a little, his eyes returned to her, standing at the gate.
“Miss Eunice, what am I thinking about? You must not stand there in the wind. I will go in with you. I am not in haste to-day. What is this I hear about your garden?”
But Eunice knew that it was not of Jabez or the garden he was thinking, as he followed her into the house. She went out of the room, and returned with a glass of milk on a tray, and her hand trembled as she set it down.
It was of Jabez and the garden that they spoke first, however. Eunice told all that he had said, and the good reason he had for wishing to make money during the summer.
“And he’ll do it too—school and college and all—I should not wonder!” said the doctor. “There seems to be a terrible hunger for knowledge among our young people these days. I am not sure that I like it. I am afraid of it.”
“Oh, doctor, you do not mean that?” said Eunice.
“In a way I do. Knowledge! No, I don’t object to the knowledge. But I have a great respect for many of the tanned faces about us, and for the hands that have been hardened by the plough and the axe. ‘The profit of the earth is for all. The king himself is served by the field.’ And I have no respect at all for those lads who take to their books and to a profession because it seems a step upward, or because such a life seems to promise an easier time. I don’t like to see our farmers’ boys turning their backs on the fields their fathers have tilled.”
“But there are more boys than there are farms, I doubt,” said Eunice, with a smile.
“Yes, that is so. But there are farms enough in the country for them all. And there is no one to take the deacon’s farm but Jabez. However, we may hope that ‘the profit of the earth’ will seem more to him after he has sowed and reaped for his own benefit.”