round.

My attention was next caught by a fine spectacle, a truly noble subject
for a painter. At the other end of the field a fine-looking youth was
driving a magnificent team of four pairs of young oxen, through whose
somber coats glanced a ruddy, glow-like name. They had the short, curry
heads that belong to the wild bull, the same large, fierce eyes and
jerky movements; they worked in an abrupt, nervous way that showed how
they still rebelled against the yoke and goad, and trembled with anger
as they obeyed the authority so recently imposed. They were what is
called "newly yoked" oxen. The man who drove them had to clear a corner
of the field that had formerly been given up to pasture, and was
filled with old tree-stumps; and his youth and energy, and his eight
half-broken animals, hardly sufficed for the Herculean task.

A child of six or seven years old, lovely as an angel, wearing round his
shoulders, over his blouse, a sheepskin that made him look like a little
Saint John the Baptist out of a Renaissance picture, was running along
in the furrow beside the plow, pricking the flanks of the oxen with a
long, light goad but slightly sharpened. The spirited animals quivered
under the child's light touch, making their yokes and head-bands creak,
and shaking the pole violently. Whenever a root stopped the advance
of the plowshare, the laborer would call every animal by name in his
powerful voice, trying to calm rather than to excite them; for the oxen,
irritated by the sudden resistance, bounded, pawed the ground with their
great cloven hoofs, and would have jumped aside and dragged the plow
across the fields, if the young man had not kept the first four in order
with his voice and goad, while the child controlled the four others.
The little fellow shouted too, but the voice which he tried to make of
terrible effect, was as sweet as his angelic face. The whole scene was
beautiful in its grace and strength; the landscape, the man, the child,
the oxen under the yoke; and in spite of the mighty struggle by which
the earth was subdued, a deep feeling of peace and sweetness reigned
over all. Each time that an obstacle was surmounted and the plow resumed
its even, solemn progress, the laborer, whose pretended violence was
but a trial of his strength, and an outlet for his energy, instantly
regained that serenity which is the right of simple souls, and looked
with fatherly pleasure toward his child, who turned to smile back a