row to the rising moon
The rainbowed road for me and you.

Along the highroad all the day
The wagons filled with apples go,
And golden pumpkins and ripe corn,
And all the ruddy overflow

From Autumn's apron, as she goes
About her orchards and her fields,
And gathers into stack and barn
The treasure that the Summer yield.

A singing heart, a laughing road,
With salutations all the way,--
The gossip dog, the hidden bird,
The pig that grunts a gruff good-day;

The apple-ladder in the trees,
A friendly voice amid the boughs,
The farmer driving home his team,
The ducks, the geese, the uddered cows;

The silver babble of the creek,
The willow-whisper--the day's end,
With murmur of the village street,
A called good-night, an unseen friend_.

CHAPTER XII

ORCHARDS AND A LINE FROM VIRGIL

Orchards! We were walking to New York--through orchards. And we might
have gone by train! A country of orchards and gold-dust sunshine falling
through the quaint tapestry trees, falling dreamily on heaped-up gold,
and the grave backs of little pigs joyously at large in the apple
twilight. A drowsy, murmuring spell was on the land, the spell of fabled
orchards, and of old enchanted gardens--

_In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon_--

the country of King Alcinous. At intervals, as we walked on through the
cider-dreamy afternoon, thinking apples, smelling apples, munching
apples, there came a mellow sound like soft thunder through the trees. It
was the thunder of apples being poured into barrels, and, as in a sleep,
the fragrant wagons passed and repassed along the road--"the slow-moving
wagons of our lady of Eleusis."

That line of Virgil came to me, as lines will sometimes come in fortunate
moments, with the satisfaction of perfect fitness to the hour and the
mood, gathering into one sacred, tear-filled phrase the deep sense that
had been possessing me, as we passed the husbandmen busy with the various
harvest, of the long antiquity of these haunted industries of the earth.

So long, so long, has man pursued these ancient tasks; so long ago was
he urging the plowshare through the furrow, so long ago the sower went
forth to sow; so long ago have there been barns and byres, granaries and
threshing-floors, mills and vineyards; so long has there been milking of
cows, and herding of sheep and swine. Can one see a field of wheat
gathered into sheaves without thi