e horses. With such simple details of
the work in hand I had found it my joy to occupy my mind. Up to that
moment the most important things in the world had seemed a straight
furrow and well-turned corners--to me, then, a profound accomplishment.

I cannot well describe it, save by the analogy of an opening door
somewhere within the house of my consciousness. I had been in the dark:
I seemed to emerge. I had been bound down: I seemed to leap up--and with
a marvellous sudden sense of freedom and joy.

I stopped there in my field and looked up. And it was as if I had never
looked up before. I discovered another world. It had been there before,
for long and long, but I had never seen nor felt it. All discoveries are
made in that way: a man finds the new thing, not in nature but in
himself.

It was as though, concerned with plow and harness and furrow, I had
never known that the world had height or colour or sweet sounds, or
that there was _feeling_ in a hillside. I forgot myself, or where I was.
I stood a long time motionless. My dominant feeling, if I can at all
express it, was of a strange new friendliness, a warmth, as though these
hills, this field about me, the woods, had suddenly spoken to me and
caressed me. It was as though I had been accepted in membership, as
though I was now recognised, after long trial, as belonging here.

Across the town road which separates my farm from my nearest
neighbour's, I saw a field, familiar, yet strangely new and unfamiliar,
lying up to the setting sun, all red with autumn, above it the
incalculable heights of the sky, blue, but not quite clear, owing to the
Indian summer haze. I cannot convey the sweetness and softness of that
landscape, the airiness of it, the mystery of it, as it came to me at
that moment. It was as though, looking at an acquaintance long known, I
should discover that I loved him. As I stood there I was conscious of
the cool tang of burning leaves and brush heaps, the lazy smoke of which
floated down the long valley and found me in my field, and finally I
heard, as though the sounds were then made for the first time, all the
vague murmurs of the country side--a cow-bell somewhere in the distance,
the creak of a wagon, the blurred evening hum of birds, insects, frogs.
So much it means for a man to stop and look up from his task. So I
stood, and I looked up and down with a glow and a thrill which I cannot
now look back upon without some envy and a little amuseme