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man who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning for
posterity. But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purring
cityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are following
the plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children in
the furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motored
off to possess the land.

I see no way but to keep the automobile and buy another plough, not for
my children's sake any more than for my own. There was an old man
living in this house when I bought it who moved back into the city and
took with him, among other things, a big grindstone and two
long-handled hayforks--for crutches, did he think? and to keep a
cutting edge on the scythe of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones?
When I am old and my children compel me to move back near the asylums
and hospitals, I shall carry into the city with me a plough; and I
shall pray the police to let me go every springtime to the Garden or
the Common and there turn a few furrows as one whom still his mother
comforteth.

It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A half-day and it is all
over, all the land ploughed that I own,--all that the Lord intended
should be tilled. A half-day--but every fallow field and patch of
stubble within me has been turned up in that time, given over for the
rain and sunshine to mellow and put into tender tilth.

No other labor, no other contact with the earth is like ploughing. You
may play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house down
on it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with your
ploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the long
fresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through the
oaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of a
closer union,--dust with dust,--of a more mystical union,--spirit with
spirit,--than any other approach, work, or rite, or ceremony, can give
you. You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond the
furrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yours
as if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak and
maple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet and
gold.

And so, until I get a new plough and a horse to pull it, I shall hire
my neighbor--hire him to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough!
This is what I have come to! _Hiring_ another to skim my cream and
share i