ching away
in illimitable pleasantness. I thought of the good smell of cows at
milking--you do not know, if you do not know!--I thought of the sights
and sounds, the heat and sweat of the hay fields. I thought of a certain
brook I knew when a boy that flowed among alders and wild parsnips,
where I waded with a three-foot rod for trout. I thought of all these
things as a man thinks of his first love. Oh, I craved the soil. I
hungered and thirsted for the earth. I was greedy for growing things.

And thus, eight years ago, I came here like one sore-wounded creeping
from the field of battle. I remember walking in the sunshine, weak yet,
but curiously satisfied. I that was dead lived again. It came to me then
with a curious certainty, not since so assuring, that I understood the
chief marvel of nature hidden within the Story of the Resurrection, the
marvel of plant and seed, father and son, the wonder of the seasons, the
miracle of life. I, too, had died: I had lain long in darkness, and now
I had risen again upon the sweet earth. And I possessed beyond others a
knowledge of a former existence, which I knew, even then, I could never
return to.

For a time, in the new life, I was happy to drunkenness--working,
eating, sleeping. I was an animal again, let out to run in green
pastures. I was glad of the sunrise and the sunset. I was glad at noon.
It delighted me when my muscles ached with work and when, after supper,
I could not keep my eyes open for sheer weariness. And sometimes I was
awakened in the night out of a sound sleep--seemingly by the very
silences--and lay in a sort of bodily comfort impossible to describe.

I did not want to feel or to think: I merely wanted to live. In the sun
or the rain I wanted to go out and come in, and never again know the
pain of the unquiet spirit. I looked forward to an awakening not without
dread for we are as helpless before birth as in the presence of death.

But like all birth, it came, at last, suddenly. All that summer I had
worked in a sort of animal content. Autumn had now come, late autumn,
with coolness in the evening air. I was plowing in my upper field--not
then mine in fact--and it was a soft afternoon with the earth turning up
moist and fragrant. I had been walking the furrows all day long. I had
taken note, as though my life depended upon it, of the occasional stones
or roots in my field, I made sure of the adjustment of the harness, I
drove with peculiar care to save th