ts head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back
to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining
to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full
of feathers.

And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long,
powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary,
an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for
captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird
and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise
and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the
rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in
the mocking ruins of plenty....

Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
back from the chores.

6

WORKMANSHIP

As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string
of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of
asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply
of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and
goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.
Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a
shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of
a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in
a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and
tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire
piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad
day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.

"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will
make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next
corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."

That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.

I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my
thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing
something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that
word "efficiency," be