Soon after this Mr. Barton arrived, and I went out to meet him in the yard and helped him unhitch the horses. Then he set me to ploughing potatoes in the garden with his youngest son, an intelligent, gentlemanlike lad of seventeen, who, as I discovered later, was preparing for college, for scarcely a day passed that his sister Julia, who teaches school in a neighboring town through the winters, did not find time to help him with his Algebra and Latin. When we were called to supper I found that my case was satisfactorily explained to the family, and that I could now read my title clear to a perfectly comfortable position among them.
Would that I could do justice to the exquisite charm which I began to feel at once in that simple, natural home-life! The men assembled at the call to supper from different quarters of the farm. There were five of us, Mr. Barton and his son Richard, and, besides me, two other hired men, Al, an inflexible Yankee transplanted from far down East, and Harry, a stalwart young Englishman of the grown-up “butcher’s boy” variety, whose “h’s” had grown to be a source of discomfort to him. We washed on the kitchen porch, and, contrary to the usual custom on the farms, we put on our coats before entering the dining-room, which is also the family sitting-room, where I had found Mrs. Barton and her daughters at work.
The table was spread with clean linen, and a napkin was at each place. Mr. Barton said grace in the midst of a reverent silence, which continued while we began upon a meal abundant enough for a hungry man and dainty enough for a lady.
After supper Harry and I went to fetch the cows, which had to be driven in from a pasture beyond a little river that flows through the farm. There were thirty-seven of them in all to be milked, but Miss Emily and Miss Julia lent a hand, so that it did not take long, and when the horses had been fed and their stalls made ready for the night, we men were free. In the dark, star-lit evening, which followed almost instantly upon the setting of the sun, we walked down to the river for the regular evening bath.
It is early yet for sight of the past week in true perspective, but even now its events take form in memory with a certain natural sequence. With only one exception, clear, radiant summer days have followed one another, days begun for us at five o’clock and spent in the hay-fields when the chores were done and breakfast over. Long days they were, full of hard work in the heat of the meadows, but there was the refreshing cool of the house at mid-day, and a dinner excellent in itself but to our whetted appetites a keen physical delight. And better even than dinner was supper at the end of the day’s work in the fields, a delicious supper of cold meats and potatoes and home-made bread and milk and tea, and finally cake with strawberries from the garden. If anything could have been better than that it was when Richard and we three hired men took towels down to the river in the gloom of the early evening, and under the clear summer stars from the high embankment covered with soft turf, with the glitter of fire-flies all about us and the air full of the deep croaking of frogs and the sharp reiterations of the katydids, dove headlong into the dark, cool, flowing water. We swam about for a quarter of an hour and came out with scarcely a trace left in our muscles of the ache of the day’s labor and then went to bed to eight hours of deepest sleep.
One was a rainy day when work in the fields was impossible, and we spent it in the barn running some of last year’s wheat through the fanning mill and measuring and sacking it ready for shipment. Then Sunday came with its long, peaceful rest. Al and Harry secured each a buggy and were given the use of two of the farm horses, and, in their best Sunday black, they started after the chores were done to take their best girls to church, and for a long drive in the afternoon.
The family attend church in Blue Earth City, but their rector has another parish and can preach here only on alternate Sundays. This was his Sunday in the other parish and there was a Sunday-school service here. The restful observance of the day seemed to me in most natural keeping with the deeply religious tone of the family life. Morning worship followed breakfast as usual; then came the preparation for church, and after the morning service and the mid-day meal, which was almost wholly prepared on Saturday, the afternoon was spent in reading. After a light supper in the evening Miss Julia played the harmonium in the parlor, and we all joined in singing hymns until bedtime.
If there is one scene more than another which I shall always remember as eminently characteristic of the household, it surely is that of morning prayers. No pressure of work, even at the very height of the haying season, is allowed to interfere with this act of worship. Immediately after breakfast the family group themselves about the dining-room, drawing off a little from the table, and Mr. Barton, taking down an old Bible from the mantel-shelf, seats himself in the rocker and begins to read the morning lesson. The passages have been from the prophecy of Ezekiel, and, stronger than any other association with that book, will hereafter be for me the sturdy figure of Mr. Barton in his working clothes, seated in a rocking-chair with his head bowed over a Bible as he reads, reverently, the oft-recurrent phrase:
The Word of the Lord came again unto me saying, Son of Man, ——
The prayer that followed has been always a simple, earnest appeal for help and guidance. It was as though our dependence upon God and His right to supreme devotion in every act of life was instinctively recognized, and that the worship was a natural expression of love to the Father of us all, thus renewing our wills and bringing us into captivity unto the obedience of Christ, and sending us forth to the duties of the day strong in the sense of the sacredness of work as service to the Lord, and of His presence with us as the source of all life and hope and strength.