better than I can, that his corn grows taller than mine, and his hens
lay more eggs. He is a wonderfully practical man, is Horace;
hard-headed, they call it here. And he never feels so superior, I think,
as when he finds me sometimes of a Sunday or an evening walking across
the fields where my land joins his, or sitting on a stone fence, or
lying on my back in the pasture under a certain friendly thorn-apple
tree. This he finds it difficult to understand, and thinks it highly
undisciplined, impractical, no doubt reprehensible.

One incident of the sort I shall never forget. It was on a June day only
a year or so after I came here, and before Horace knew me as well as he
does now. I had climbed the hill to look off across his own high-field
pasture, where the white daisies, the purple fleabane, and the
buttercups made a wild tangle of beauty among the tall herd's grass.
Light airs moved billowing across the field, bobolinks and meadow larks
were singing, and all about were the old fences, each with its wild
hedgerow of choke cherry, young elms, and black raspberry bushes, and
beyond, across miles and miles of sunny green countryside, the
mysterious blue of the ever-changing hills. It was a spot I loved then,
and have loved more deeply every year since.

Horace found me sitting on the stone fence which there divides our
possessions; I think he had been observing me with amusement for some
time before I saw him, for when I looked around his face wore a
comfortably superior, half-disdainful smile.

"David," said he, "what ye doin' here?"

"Harvesting my crops," I said.