'Going to supper?'

'Ye-ep,' very slowly across the wash of the uncut grass.

'Say, that corncrib wants painting.'

''Do that when we get around to it.'

They go off through the dusk, without farewell or salutation steadily as
their own steers. And there are a few millions of them--unhandy men to
cross in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and as
impenetrable as that other Eastern fanner who is the bedrock of another
land. They do not appear in the city papers, they are not much heard in
the streets, and they tell very little in the outsider's estimate of
America.

And _they_ are the American.




LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK

(1895)


We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning, and that was
when the first blood-root came up between the patches of April snow,
while yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held fast. In the
shadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles, clots of snow lay