THE SOWER.
The farmer had left England when he was a stripling, and I tried to talk to him of the old country, but he was not really interested. He did not want to go back.
That is the Colonial feeling.
Strange to plough all day, or sow or reap, and in the evening to return to the quiet, solitary house of wood beside the great red-painted barn and not want England or Europe, not be interested in it, not want anything more than you've got; to have the sun go down red and whisper nought, and the stars come up and the moon, and yet not yearn; to work, to eat, to market; to have children growing about you ripening in so many years, and corn springing up in the fields ripening in so many weeks; births, marriages, deaths, sowings, harvests....
There is all the pathos of man's life in it.
I slept that night in the dry wayside hay, under the broad sky and the misty golden moon. It was a quiet night, warm and gentle. Earth held the wanderer in her cradle and rocked him to sleep.
They are kind people about here. Next morning as I sat by my fire a woman sent her son out to me with a quart of milk and a bag of cookies. And milk is a much commercialised business on this western road,—the electric freight train carries nearly all the milk away in churns to Toledo. It was a very welcome talkative boy who brought out the milk. His father rented one-third of a section (213 acres), but was now laid up with pneumonia. As a consequence of the father's illness the young children had to work very hard in the fields. And there was a sick cow on the farm—sick through eating rank clover. And the boy himself had had scarlet fever in the spring. The serving-girl had had to go away "to have her little baby," and the one that came in her place brought the fever.
"What's your name?" said I.
"Charles."