alle. "Handy ees
violinist-a."

HEART OF YOUTH[12]

BY WALTER J. MUILENBURG

From _The Midland_

[12] Copyright, 1915, by John T. Frederick. Copyright, 1916, by Walter
J. Muilenburg.

The boy on the cultivator straightened as the horses walked from the
soft, spongy ground of the cornfield to the firmer turf at the side
of the road. He spoke sharply to the plodding team and turned the
cultivator around, lowering the blades for another row. Then, when
the horses had fallen into a slow walk, he slouched down, and with
bent head watched the hills of young corn pass beneath him.

He could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, for his eager
eyes looked out from under soft lashes, and his face showed the smooth,
healthy tan of a boy. His brown hands were so small that he could barely
keep a firm grasp on the heavy levers. When he raised the blades, his
fingers became streaked with red and the corners of his mouth drew back
and grew hard with concentrated effort. Occasionally he tugged at the
reins knotted about his shoulders, but, except for his low, abrupt
commands to the horses, he was silent. At the end of the row he raised
the shovels, got off the cultivator stiffly, and stretched himself out
in the new spring grass of a little rise by the roadside.

All around him the world was full of soft color and light. Close by,
in the sun the corn-field was a sea of shimmering green, while the more
distant fields of grain were dark against the light ash of plowed land.
Above, the sun shone slanting from the blue of an early June sky. The
air, clean and clear, was already pervaded with the drowsy lassitude of
noon.

The boy looked listlessly out over the long rows of corn still to be
cultivated. Near at hand the young stalks seemed strong enough to win
in their struggle toward the sun, but the distant corn lay like a filmy
shadow of green on the black soil. Behind the cultivator, a flock of
blackbirds fed in the fresh-turned earth. The boy watched them with
half-shut eyes. When one of the birds had fed, it would hop upon a lump
of wet, black earth, and being satisfied that it could eat no more,
would skim in rapid, undulating flight to the row of willows in the next
pasture. On a fence-post, a meadow-lark filled the silence with a liquid
flow of music. As it laid back its head in an abandon of joy, the boy
noticed how the sun accentuated the vivid splash of black on its yellow
throat.

The meadow-lar