synthesis taking place, a gathering together of the scattered threads of
many interests, a vague sense of the wholeness of life.

At five o'clock the cows turn towards home, and graze their leisurely
way along the barnyard lanes. And with the cows come duties,--
chore-time,--then the simple, cold supper, then the short, quiet
evening, and off we swing into the night that sweeps us away from the
crest down into the long, blind hollow of the week.

VII

The Grooming of the Farm

There is a story about an artist who espied a picturesque old man and
wished to paint him. At the time appointed the model arrived--new-shaven,
new-washed, freshly attired, with all the delicious and incommunicable
flavor of the years irretrievably lost! Doubtless there are many such
stories; doubtless the thing has happened many, many times. And I am
sorrier for the artist now than I used to be, because it is happening to
me.

Only it is not an old man--it is the farm, the blessed old farm,
unkempt, unshorn, out at the elbows. In spite of itself, in spite of me,
in spite of everybody, the farm is being groomed.

It is nobody's fault, of course. Like most hopelessly disastrous things,
it has all been done with the best possible intentions, perhaps it has
even been necessary, but it is none the less deplorable.

It began, I think, with the sheds. They had in ages past been added one
after another by a method of almost unconscious accretion, as the
chambered nautilus makes his shell. They looked as if they had been, not
exactly built, but rather laid together in the desultory, provisional
fashion of the farmer, and held by an occasional nail, or the natural
adhesion of the boards themselves. They leaned confidingly against the
great barn and settled comfortably among the bare faces of rock in the
barnyard, as if they had always been there, as, indeed, they had been
there longer than any one now living can remember. Neither they nor the
barn had ever been painted, and they had all weathered to a
silver-gray--not the gray of any paint or stain ever made, but the gray
that comes only to certain kinds of wood when it has lived out in the
rain and the sunshine for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. It is to an
old building what white hair is to an old lady. And as not all white
hair is beautiful, so not all gray buildings are beautiful. But these
were beautiful. When it rained, they grew dark and every knot-hole
showed. When the sun came o