he impractical dreamer
at that!"

For a moment Horace answered nothing; and we both stood still there in
the soft morning sunshine with the peaceful fields and woods all about
us, two human atoms struggling hotly with questions too large for us.
The cow and the new calf were long out of sight. Horace made a motion as
if to follow them up the lane, but I held him with my glittering eye--as
I think of it since, not without a kind of amusement at my own
seriousness.

"I'm the practical man, Horace, for I want my peace now, and my
happiness now, and my God now. I can't wait. My barns may burn or my
cattle die, or the solid bank where I keep my deferred joy may fail, or
I myself by to-morrow be no longer here."

So powerfully and vividly did this thought take possession of me that I
cannot now remember to have said a decent good-bye to Horace (never
mind, he knows me!). At least when I was halfway up the hill I found
myself gesticulating with one clenched fist and saying to myself with a
kind of passion: "Why wait to be peaceful? Why not he peaceful now? Why
not be happy now? Why not be rich now?"

For I think it truth that a life uncommanded now is uncommanded; a life
unenjoyed now is unenjoyed; a life not lived wisely now is not lived
wisely: for the past is gone and no one knows the future.

As for Horace is he convinced that he is an impractical dreamer. Not a
bit of it! He was merely flurried for a moment in his mind, and probably
thinks me now, more than ever before, just what I think him. Absurd
place, isn't it, this world?

So I reached home at last. You have no idea, unless you have tried it
yourself, how good breakfast tastes alter a three-mile tramp in the
sharp morning air. The odour of ham and eggs, and new muffins, and
coffee, as you come up the hill, there is an odour for you! And it was
good to see Harriet.

"Harriet," I said, "you are a sight for tired eyes."

CHAPTER IV

THE GREEN PEOPLE

I have always had a fondness, when upon my travels about the world of
the near-by woods and fields, for nipping a bit of a twig here and there
and tasting the tart or bitter quality of it. I suppose the instinct
descends to me from the herbivorous side of my distant ancestry. I love
a spray of white cedar, especially the spicy, sweet inside bark, or a
pine needle, or the tender, sweet, juicy end of a spike of timothy grass
drawn slowly from its close-fitting sheath, or a twig of the birch that
tastes li