nking of the dream of Joseph, or be
around a farm at lambing time without smiling to recall the cunning of
Jacob? Already were all these things weary and old and romantic when
Virgil wrote and admonished the husbandman of times and seasons, of
plows and harrows, of mattocks and hurdles, and the mystical winnowing
fan of Iacchus.

To the meditative, romantic mind, the farmer and plowman, standing thus
in the foreground of the infinite perspective of time, take on a sacred
significance, as of traditional ministers of the ancient mysteries of
the earth.

Perhaps it is one's involuntary sense of this haunted antiquity that
gives its peculiar expressiveness to the solemn, almost religious quiet
of barns and stables, the, so to say, prehistoric hush of brooding,
sun-steeped rickyards; and gives, too, a homely, sacerdotal look to the
implements and vessels of the farm. A churn or a cheese-press gives one
the same deep, uncanny thrill of the terrible vista of time as Stonehenge
itself; and from such implements, too, there seems to breathe a sigh--a
sigh of the long travail and unbearable pathos of the race of men.

You will thus see the satisfaction, in moods of such meditation, of
carrying in one's knapsack a line from Virgil--"the slow-moving wagons of
our Lady of Eleusis"--and I congratulated myself on my forethought in
having included in our itinerant library a copy of Mr. Mackail's
beautiful translation of "The Georgics." Walt Whitman, talking to one of
his friends about his habit of carrying a book with him on his nature
rambles, said that nine times out of ten he would never open the book,
but that the tenth time he would need it very badly. So I needed "The
Georgics" very badly that afternoon, and the hour would have lost much of
its perfection had I not been able to take the book from my knapsack, and
corroborate my mood, while Colin was sketching an old barn, by reading
aloud from its consecrated pages:

"_I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them of old, if thou shrink not
back nor weary to learn of lowly cares. Above all must the
threshing-floor be levelled with the ponderous roller, and wrought by
hand and cemented with clinging potter's clay, that it may not gather
weeds nor crack in the reign of dust, and be playground withal for
manifold destroyers. Often the tiny mouse builds his house and makes his
granaries underground, or the eyeless mole scoops his cell; and in chinks
is found the toad, and all the sw