some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed
upon the things read in newspapers and magazines, on
fortunes to be made almost without effort by shrewd men
who bought and sold. For him the coming of the boy
David did much to bring back with renewed force the old
faith and it seemed to him that God had at last looked
with favor upon him.

As for the boy on the farm, life began to reveal itself
to him in a thousand new and delightful ways. The
kindly attitude of all about him expanded his quiet
nature and he lost the half timid, hesitating manner he
had always had with his people. At night when he went
to bed after a long day of adventures in the stables,
in the fields, or driving about from farm to farm with
his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the
house. If Sherley Bentley, the woman who came each
night to sit on the floor by his bedside, did not
appear at once, he went to the head of the stairs and
shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow
halls where for so long there had been a tradition of
silence. In the morning when he awoke and lay still in
bed, the sounds that came in to him through the windows
filled him with delight. He thought with a shudder of
the life in the house in Winesburg and of his mother's
angry voice that had always made him tremble. There in
the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. When he
awoke at dawn the barnyard back of the house also
awoke. In the house people stirred about. Eliza
Stoughton the half-witted girl was poked in the ribs by
a farm hand and giggled noisily, in some distant field
a cow bawled and was answered by the cattle in the
stables, and one of the farm hands spoke sharply to the
horse he was grooming by the stable door. David leaped
out of bed and ran to a window. All of the people
stirring about excited his mind, and he wondered what
his mother was doing in the house in town.

From the windows of his own room he could not see
directly into the barnyard where the farm hands had now
all assembled to do the morning shores, but he could
hear the voices of the men and the neighing of the
horses. When one of the men laughed, he laughed also.
Leaning out at the open window, he looked into an
orchard where a fat sow wandered about with a litter of
tiny pigs at her heels. Every morning he counted the
pigs. "Four, five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting
his finger and making straight up and down marks on the
window ledge. David ran to put