The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

In our more artificial forms of living we habitually eat when we are not hungry, and drink when we are not thirsty, and we know little of the sheer physical delight in meat and drink when our natures seize joyously upon the means of life, and organs work in glad adaptation to function, and the organism, in full revival, responds to its environment!

The work moves uninterruptedly in the afternoon; and at six o'clock, as I wearily drag my feet along the lane by the farmer's side, I can see his daughter driving the cattle through the pasture to the cowyard, and I wonder how I shall fare at the evening milking. But I am not put to that test; for the farmer declines my offer of help, with the explanation that, under our arrangement, my day's work is done at six o'clock, and that he is not entitled to further help, nor does he need it, he adds, for his wife and daughter always lend a hand at the chores.

Supper is almost a repetition of dinner, with a pitcher of rich milk kindly pressed upon me when I decline the tea, and with apple-sauce and cake in the place of pumpkin-pie. Soon after, I am lighting my way with a lantern through the dark to my cot in the loft, and for ten hours I sleep the sleep of a child, and awake at six in the morning to the farmer's call of "John, hey John!" from under the window.

All of that day, which was Wednesday, was given to completing the work on the dam. The necessary excavation was soon finished, and then we laid the timbers, and nailed the new planks into place, and filled in and packed the earth behind them. Over the completed job the farmer expressed such a depth of satisfaction that I felt a glow of pride in the work, and a sense of proprietorship, which was splendidly compensating for the effort which it had cost.

The remaining three days of the week we spent in picking apples. Behind the wagon-house was an orchard. Mr. Hill first selected a tree, and then we placed under it the number of empty barrels, which, in his judgment, corresponded to its yield, a judgment which was always singularly accurate. Then, each supplied with a half-bushel basket with a wooden hook attached to the handle, we next climbed among the branches, and suspending our baskets, we carefully picked the apples with a quick upward turn of the fruit, which detached them at the point at which the stem was fast to the twig. Both baskets were usually full at about the same moment, and then we took turns in climbing down and receiving the baskets from the tree, and emptying the apples into the barrels with great caution against possible bruising.

All this was Arcadian in its joyous simplicity. All day we moved among the boughs, breathing the fragrance of ripened fruit and the mellow odor of apple-trees turning at the touch of frost; picking ceaselessly the full-juiced apples "sweetened with the summer light," while above us white clouds fled briskly before the northwest wind across the clear blue of the autumn sky; and below us lay the pasture, where the patient cattle grazed, and beyond stretched open country of field and forest, which, in that crystal air, met the horizon in a clean, sharp line.

Mr. Hill and I were growing very chummy. A faint uncomfortable distrust of me, which I suspected through the first two days, had wholly disappeared. We talked with perfect freedom now and with a growing liking for each other, which, for me, added vastly to the charm of those six days on the farm.

I tried at first to lead the talk, and to draw Mr. Hill into expressions of his views of life, that I might learn his attitude toward modern progress, and catch glimpses of the growth of things from his point of view. But Mr. Hill was proof against such promptings. He was a shrewd, practical farmer, with a masterful hold upon all the details of his enterprise, and with a mind quickened by thrifty conduct of his own affairs to a catholic taste for information. His schooling had been limited, he said, but he must have meant his actual school training; for life itself had been his school, and admirably had he improved its advantages. He was a trained observer and a close student of actual events. Instead of my getting him to talk, he made me talk, but with so natural a force as to rob it of all thought of compulsion.

The talk drifted early into politics, and I soon found that my light-hearted generalizations would not pass muster. Back and back he would press me upon the data of each induction, until I was forced to tell what I knew, or was confronted with my ignorance.