t! Let me handle both team and plough, a plough that guides
itself, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a furrow,--a long
straight furrow that curls and crests like a narrow wave and breaks
evenly into the trough of the wave before.

But even with the hired plough, I am taking part in the making of
spring; and more: I am planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat of
chickweed,--lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chickweed,--in the earth,
whence, so long ago it sometimes seems, I was pulled up.

But the ploughing does more--more than root me as a weed. Ploughing is
walking not by sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something he
cannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of faith. In all time men
have known and _feared_ God; but there must have been a new and higher
consciousness when they began to plough. They hunted and feared God
and remained savage; they ploughed, trusted, and loved God--and became
civilized.

Nothing more primitive than the plough have we brought with us out of
our civilized past. In the furrow was civilization cradled, and there,
if anywhere, shall it be interred.

You go forth unto your day's work, if you have land enough, until the
Lord's appointed close; then homeward plod your weary way, leaving the
world to the poets. Not yours

"The hairy gown, the mossy cell."

You have no need of them.

What more

"Of every star that Heaven doth shew
And every hearb that sips the dew"

can the poet spell than all day long you have _felt_? Has ever poet
handled more of life than you? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom
of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than you of your field? Has
he ever found anything sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome
toilsome round of the plough?

[Illustration: Mere beans]

VII

MERE BEANS

"God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it;
he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited."--Isaiah.

"A farmer," said my neighbor, Joel Moore, with considerable finality,
"has got to get all he can, and keep all he gets, or die."

"Yes," I replied with a fine platitude; "but he's got to give if he's
going to get."

"Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with wrath as it traveled the
trail of the fox across the dooryard; "just so, and I 'll go halves
with the soil; but I never signed a lease to run this farm on shares
with the varmints."

"Well," said I, "I 've come out from the city to ru