I soused my head in the cool
stream, dashed the water upon my arms and came up dripping and gasping!
Oh, but it was fine!

So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where I sat down comfortably and
stretched my legs. There is a poem in stretched legs--after hard
digging--but I can't write it, though I can feel it! I got my bag and
took out a half loaf of Harriet's bread. Breaking off big crude pieces,
I ate it there in the shade. How rarely we taste the real taste of
bread! We disguise it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk or
fruit. We even soak it with gravy (here in the country where we aren't
at all polite--but very comfortable), so that we never get the downright
delicious taste of the bread itself. I was hungry this morning and I ate
my half loaf to the last crumb--and wanted more. Then I lay down for a
moment in the shade and looked up into the sky through the thin outer
branches of the hawthorn. A turkey buzzard was lazily circling
cloud-high above me: a frog boomed intermittently from the little marsh,
and there were bees at work in the blossoms.

--I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly,
I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn
off. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes a
sort of machine--unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work,
though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the
consciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long
afterward every separate step in a task.

It is curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I
often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save
that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself--down
with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it--and repeat. And
yet sometimes--mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired--I will
suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me--a sense of its
beauty and its meanings--giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is
near complete content--

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work.
It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere
thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For
happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves
sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but
lurking in cornfields and factories and hov