rafted for service
in the fields. And all the doors and windows, both in the little
villages and on the farms, stand wide open to the sunshine, and all the
women and girls are busy in the yards and gardens. Such a fine, active,
gossipy, adventurous world as it is at this moment of the year!

It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are afoot.
People who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter now take to
the open road--all the peddlers and agents and umbrella-menders, all the
nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents, all the tramps and scientists
and poets--all abroad in the wide sunny roads. They, too, know well this
hospitable moment of the spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts
are open and that even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of
adventure. Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or
listen to a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!

For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the bustling life
of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul, but strode straight
ahead. The spring has been late and cold: most of the corn and some of
the potatoes are not yet in, and the tobacco lands are still bare and
brown. Occasionally I stopped to watch some ploughman in the fields:
I saw with a curious, deep satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly
turned, glistened in the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something
right and fit about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening
I would stop to watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new brown
fields, raising a cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow
crests. The low sun shining through the dust and glorifying it, the
weary-stepping horses, the man all sombre-coloured like the earth
itself and knit into the scene as though a part of it, made a picture
exquisitely fine to see.

And what a joy I had also of the lilacs blooming in many a dooryard, the
odour often trailing after me for a long distance in the road, and of
the pungent scent at evening in the cool hollows of burning brush
heaps and the smell of barnyards as I went by--not unpleasant, not
offensive--and above all, the deep, earthy, moist odour of new-ploughed
fields.

And then, at evening, to hear the sound of voices from the dooryards as
I pass quite unseen; no words, but just pleasant, quiet intonations of
human voices, borne through the still air, or the low sounds of cattle
in the barnyards, quieting do