er!

It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of the
land. While it is patient, it never waits long for you. There is a
chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for harvesting.
You accept the gauge thrown down--well and good, you shall have a chance
to fight! You do not accept it? There is no complaint. The land
cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and
pig-weed--and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you.

Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a small
piece of land at second hand. To be accepted as One Who Belongs, there
must be sweat and weariness.

The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down
through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in
four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt,
about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then
throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below
a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth
glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full rich
green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the cluck
of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed green. And
as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling of coming
somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own land. For
titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor with money
changing from one hand to another, but for true possession one must work
and serve according to the most ancient law. There is no mitigation and
no haggling of price. Those who think they can win the greatest joys of
country life on any easier terms are mistaken.

But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it,
and planted it and harvested it--even though it be only a few acres--
how he comes to know and to love every rod of it. He knows the wet
spots, and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots
--until his acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every
characteristic he knows. It is so also that he comes to know his horses
and cattle and pigs and hens. It is a fine thing, on a warm day in early
spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their first
flight in the sunshine. What cleanly folk they are! And later to see
them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows! It is a
fine