The son only shrugged; he knew that he would have to let the old man talk.
"It's just thirty-one years now since I, as a young man, bought a piece of waste land on the north side of this parish," said the farmer. "The ground had never been touched by a spade. Half of it was bog, the other half a mass of stones. It looked pretty bad. On that very land I worked like a slave, digging up stones until my back was ready to break. But I think I laboured even harder with the swamp, before I finally got it drained and filled in."
"Yes, you have certainly worked hard, father," the son admitted.
"This is why God thinks of you, and summons you to His Holy Land."
"At first," the farmer went on, "I lived in a hovel that wasn't much better than a charcoaler's hut. It was made of unstripped logs, with only sod for a roof. I could never make that but water tight; so the rains always came in. It was mighty uncomfortable, especially at night. The cow and the horse fared no better than I; the whole of the first winter they were housed in a mud cave that was as dark as a cellar."
"Father, how can you be so attached to a place where you have suffered such hardships?"
"But only think of the joy of it when I was able to build a big barn for the animals, and when year by year my livestock increased so that I was always having to add new extensions for housing them. If I were not going to sell the place now, I should have to put a new roof on the barn. This would have been just the time to do it— as soon as I'd finished with the sowing."
"Father, you are to do your sowing in that land where some seeds fall among thorns, some on stony ground, some by the wayside, and some on good ground."
"And the old cottage," the farmer pursued, "which I built after the first hut, I had thought of pulling down this year, to put up a fine new dwelling house. What's to be done now with all the timber that we two hauled home in the winter? It was mighty tough work getting it down. The horses were hard driven, and so were we."
The son began to feel troubled. He thought his father was slipping away from him. He feared that the old man was not going to offer his property to the Lord in the right spirit. "Well," he argued, "but what are new houses and barns as compared with the blessed privilege of living a pure life among people who are of one mind?"
"Hallelujah!" cried the father. "Don't you suppose I know that a wonderful portion has been allotted to us? Am I not on my way to the works to sell my property to the Company? When I come back this way everything will be gone, and I shall have nothing I can call mine."