the sunshine, and all the women and girls are busy in the yards
and gardens. Such a fine, active, gossipy, adventurous world as
it is at this moment of the year!

It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are
afoot. People who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter
now take to the open road--all the peddlers and agents and
umbrella-menders, all the nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents,
all the tramps and scientists and poets--all abroad in the wide
sunny roads. They, too, know well this hospitable moment of the
spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts are open and that
even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of adventure.
Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or listen to
a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!

For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the
bustling life of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul,
but strode straight ahead. The spring has been late and cold:
most of the corn and some of the potatoes are not yet in, and the
tobacco lands are still bare and brown. Occasionally I stopped to
watch some ploughman in the fields: I saw with a curious, deep
satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly turned, glistened in
the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something right and fit
about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening I would
stop to watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new brown
fields, raising a cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow
crests. The low sun shining through the dust and glorifying it,
the weary-stepping horses, the man all sombre-coloured like the
earth itself and knit into the scene as though a part of it, made
a picture exquisitely fine to see.