It comes to me as the wonder of wonders, these spring days, how surely everything, spiritual as well as material, proceeds out of the earth.  I have times of sheer Paganism when I could bow and touch my face to the warm bare soil.  We are so often ashamed of the Earth—­the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness of it.  To us in our fine raiment and soft manners, it seems indelicate.  Instead of seeking that association with the earth which is the renewal of life, we devise ourselves distant palaces and seek strange pleasures.  How often and sadly we repeat the life story of the yellow dodder of the moist lanes of my lower farm.  It springs up fresh and clean from the earth itself, and spreads its clinging viny stems over the hospitable wild balsam and golden rod.  In a week’s time, having reached the warm sunshine of the upper air, it forgets its humble beginnings.  Its roots wither swiftly and die out, but the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds.  I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder—­rootless, leafless, parasitic—­reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life.  A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably.  So many of us come to be like that:  so much of our civilization is like that.  Men and women there are—­the pity of it—­who, eating plentifully, have never themselves taken a mouthful from the earth.  They have never known a moment’s real life of their own.  Lying up to the sun in warmth and comfort—­but leafless—­they do not think of the hosts under them, smothered, strangled, starved.  They take nothing at first hand.  They experience described emotion, and think prepared thoughts.  They live not in life, but in printed reports of life.  They gather the odour of odours, not the odour itself:  they do not hear, they overhear.  A poor, sad, second-rate existence!

Bring out your social remedies!  They will fail, they will fail, every one, until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil!

My wild plum trees grow in the coarse earth, among excrementitious mould, a physical life which finally blossoms and exhales its perfect odour:  which ultimately bears the seed of its immortality.

Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation of work:  and the seed of human immortality is borne secretly within the coarse and mortal husk.  So many of us crave the odour without cultivating the earthly growth from which it proceeds:  so many, wasting mortality, expect immortality!

——­“Why,” asks Charles Baxter, “do you always put the end of your stories first?”

“You may be thankful,” I replied, “that I do not make my remarks all endings.  Endings are so much more interesting than beginnings.”

Without looking up from the buggy he was mending, Charles Baxter intimated that my way had at least one advantage:  one always knew, he said, that I really had an end in view—­and hope deferred, he said——­