e that is born, that labours its full day with its
face to the ground, from which it looks for its sustenance, and at last
is carried, spent, to the square ground which holds the memory and
remains of the dead.

Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the
landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group,
for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion
is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is
accomplished within a tilled field.

Under a sky that is infinite and a heaven accessible to all, the poor
"work for their living," bowed always a little towards tragedy yet
understanding joy, from the bitterness of life and death and the added
anguish of ignorance drinking often their safety.

CHAPTER II

It was evening in the country at harvest-time, at that moment towards
sundown when the light, about to be withdrawn, glows with a fulness of
gold which makes it seem impossible that it can ever die. The earth was
heavy with fruition, every square field brimful of the ungathered
harvest. The heavy corn swayed almost by reason of its own weight. A
thunderstorm would beat it prostrate in an hour. All the crops were full
and good, some almost level with the low hedges. Heat seemed to radiate
from the yellow mass, that scorching heat which in autumn never seems to
leave the earth, but to linger about the ground, surrounding the
responsive and standing corn. But the day had brought no heaviness to
the sky, blue without a cloud, only a grave and increasing heat, a sun
which blinded the eyes and seemed to take no account of anything save
its steady purpose of ripening the fruit and grain.

Looking round one saw that it was not an impressive country. There were
no hills, no grandeurs, no proximity to the sea. It was a country whose
pageants were made, not by great heights or sombre woods, but by the
orderly and coloured procession of the harvests; where one recovered the
preoccupied sight of little children, seeing so much to absorb one near
the ground that one did not seek the horizon; where matters were
measured and done not by the clock but by the sun's height, by midday
heat and darkness, by the lowing of cows or the calling of lambs.

A woman, well on the way to middle age, sat in the house-place of a
small cottage on the white high-road. Everything had been done for the
night, the pigs and pony fed; the cow milked and