nder the trees with all the abandon, under stress of fate, of a
child.

Chapter XXVIII

Andrew Brewster, lying in the dewy grass under the apple-trees,
giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses
which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead
of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung
to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt
the indignity of coping with such petty odds. "For God's sake, if I
had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something?"
he groaned, speaking with his lips close to the earth as if it were
a listening ear. "Why need it all have been over so little? It's
just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that's getting the
better of me that was a man, and able to do a man's work in the
world. Now it has come to this! Here I am runnin' away from a woman
because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of
another woman because--I've been and fooled away a few hundred
dollars I had in the savings-bank. I'm afraid--yes, it has come to
this. I am afraid, afraid, and I'd run away out of life if I knew
where it would fetch me to. I'm afraid of things that ain't worth
being afraid of, and it's all over things that's beneath me." There
came over Andrew, with his mouth to the moist earth, feeling the
breath and the fragrance of it in his nostrils, a realization of the
great motherhood of nature, and a contempt for himself which was
scorching and scathing before it. He felt that he came from that
mighty breast which should produce only sons of might, and was
spending his whole life in an ignominy of fruitless climbing up
mole-hills. "Why couldn't I have been more?" he asked himself. "Oh,
my God, is it my fault?" He said to himself that if he had not
yielded to the universal law and longing of his kind for a home and
a family, it might have been better. He asked himself that question
which will never be answered with a surety of correctness, whether
the advancement of the individual to his furthest compass is more to
the glory of life than the blind following out of the laws of
existence and the bringing others into the everlasting problem of
advance. Then he thought of Ellen, and a great warmth of conviction
came over the loving heart of the man; all his self-contempt
vanished. He had her, this child who was above pearls and rubies, he
had her, and in her the furthest reach of