d was passed.

The Governor was set to work with two other men ripping out an old rail
fence and replacing it with wire. Archie's task was the rather more
disagreeable one of trundling gravel in a wheelbarrow and distributing
it in holes staked for his guidance in the road that ran from the
highway gate to the barn. The holes were small; it seemed to Archie
absurd to spend time filling such small cavities; and a wheelbarrow
filled with gravel is heavy. The foreman explained the job and departed,
reappearing from time to time for the pleasure of criticizing Archie's
work. When Archie suggested that there would be an economy of time in
loading the gravel into a wagon and effecting the distribution by that
means the foreman stared at him open-mouthed for a moment, then burst
into ironical laughter.

"Give _you_ a team to handle--you!"

The thought of trusting Archie with a team when teams were needed for
much more important matters struck the cynical foreman as a gross
impiety. The humor of the thing was too tremendous to be enjoyed alone;
he yelled to a man who was driving by in a motor truck filled with milk
cans to stop and hear the joke. Archie's soul burned within him. That a
man of education who belonged to the best clubs on the continent should
be proclaimed a fool by a hatchet-faced farmer in overalls, before a fat
person on a milk truck was the most crushing of all humiliations. The
foreman jumped on the truck and rode away, and Archie bent his back to
the barrow, resolving that never again would he complain of bumps in a
road now that he knew the heart-breaking and back-breaking labor of
road-mending.

On the whole he did a good job; it was remarkable how interested one
could become in so contemptible a task. He tamped the gravel into the
holes with the loving care of a dentist filling a tooth, and struck work
with reluctance when the bell sounded for supper.

The Governor was already on terms of comradeship with his fellow
toilers, and as they splashed in the basins set out on a long plank near
the kitchen, his quips kept them laughing. Two college boys had just
arrived to aid in the harvesting. Farmers are not much given to humor
and the young fellows were clearly pleased to find a jester on the
premises. At the supper table the Governor gave his conversational
powers free rein. This was the only life; he had rested all winter so
that he might enjoy farm life the more. He subjected the collegians to a
rig