e colour and the
rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he
toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might
fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the
high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with
the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as
were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the
city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though
form and substance are the same.

Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to
introspection. For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a
comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers,
have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps even you should know
him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of
the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots.

At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long,
slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those
rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals
canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A
serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew
older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated
the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost
of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.

* * * * *

The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds
of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had
married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost
entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of
those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County,
then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills,
majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical
Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their
relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his
face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for
clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring
flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the
drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men
are natural mech