s, but I never yet knew a healthy man who did not recall many
moments of exquisite pleasure connected with the hardest and the hottest
work.

I think sometimes that the nearer a man can place himself in the full
current of natural things the happier he is. If he can become a part of
the Universal Process and know that he is a part, that is happiness. All
day yesterday I had that deep quiet feeling that I was somehow not
working for myself, not because I was covetous for money, nor driven by
fear, not surely for fame, but somehow that I was a necessary element in
the processes of the earth. I was a primal force! I was the
indispensable Harvester. Without me the earth could not revolve!

Oh, friend, there are spiritual values here, too. For how can a man
know God without yielding himself fully to the processes of God?

I _lived_ yesterday. I played my part. I took my place. And all hard
things grew simple, and all crooked things seemed straight, and all
roads were open and clear before me. Many times that day I paused and
looked up from my work knowing that I had something to be happy for.

At one o'clock Dick and I lagged our way unwillingly out to work
again--rusty of muscles, with a feeling that the heat would now surely
be unendurable and the work impossibly hard. The scythes were oddly
heavy and hot to the touch, and the stones seemed hardly to make a sound
in the heavy noon air. The cows had sought the shady pasture edges, the
birds were still, all the air shook with heat. Only man must toil!

"It's danged hot," said Dick conclusively.

How reluctantly we began the work and how difficult it seemed compared
with the task of the morning! In half an hour, however, the reluctance
passed away and we were swinging as steadily as we did at any time in
the forenoon. But we said less--if that were possible--and made every
ounce of energy count. I shall not here attempt to chronicle all the
events of the afternoon, how we finished the mowing of the field and how
we went over it swiftly and raked the long windrows into cocks, or how,
as the evening began to fall, we turned at last wearily toward the
house. The day's work was done.

Dick had stopped whistling long before the middle of the afternoon, but
now as he shouldered his scythe he struck up "My Fairy Fay" with some
marks of his earlier enthusiasm.

"Well, Dick," said I, "we've had a good day's work together."

"You bet," said Dick.

And I watched him as he wen