ind he will not respond.

I think there is a real moral principle involved. I believe that this deep
instinct for labor in and about the soil is a valid one, and that the
gathering together of people in cities has been at the cost of an obscure
but actual moral shock.

I doubt if the people of the cities can ever be at rest in a future full
of moral searchings of conscience until every man has traced definitely
the connection of the work he is doing with the maintenance of his
country's population. Sometimes those vocations whose connection can not
be so traced will be recognized as wicked ones, and people engaged in them
will feel as did Jim--until he worked out the facts in the relation of
school-teaching to the feeding, clothing and sheltering of the world. Most
school-teaching he believed--correctly or incorrectly--has very little to
do with the primary task of the human race; but as far as his teaching was
concerned, even he believed in it. If by teaching school he could not make
a greater contribution to the productiveness of the Woodruff District than
by working in the fields, he would go back to the fields. Whether he could
make his teaching thus productive or not was the very fact in issue
between him and the local body politic.

These are some of the waters that ran under the bridges before the Fourth
of July picnic at Eight-Mile Grove. Few surface indications there were of
any change in the little community in this annual gathering of friends and
neighbors. Wilbur Smythe made the annual address, and was in rather finer
fettle than usual as he paid his fervid tribute to the starry flag, and to
this very place as the most favored spot in the best country of the
greatest state in the most powerful, intellectual, freest and most
progressive nation in the best possible of worlds. Wilbur was going
strong. Jim Irwin read the Declaration rather well, Jennie Woodruff
thought, as she sat on the platform between Deacon Avery, the oldest
settler in the district, and Mrs. Columbus Brown, the sole local
representative of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Colonel
Woodruff presided in his Grand Army of the Republic uniform.

The fresh northwest breeze made free with the oaks, elms, hickories and
box-elders of Eight-Mile Grove, and the waters of Pickerel Creek glimmered
a hundred yards away, beyond the flitting figures of the boys who
preferred to shoot off their own fire-crackers and torpedoes and
nigger-chasers,