while, Ernest? Do you mean to
farm all your life?"

"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before
now. What makes you ask that?"

"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future
sometime. And you're so practical."

"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big
word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I'm
going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a
nice girl and bring her back."

"Is that all?"

"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"

"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever
settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this rate there
isn't much in it?"

"In what?"

"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad
to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel
sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a
holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to
bed--nothing has happened."

"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
see my friends like this, it's enough for me."

"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there
ought to be something--well, something splendid about life,
sometimes."

Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. "You
Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make
the most of little things."

"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
things."

"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
vanity to help them along, too."

Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at
a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, "The fact
is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
and clothes and Sundays off, don't you?"

Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I
think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
down from the sky