Volume 1.
Proem
I. “Pioneers, O pioneers”
II. Closing the doors
III. The Logan trial and
what came of it
IV. “Strength shall be
given Thee”
V. A story to be told
Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea
of gold it is, with gentle billows telling of sleep
and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot, salute
the reaper and say, “All is fulfilled in the
light of the sun and the way of the earth; let the
sharp knife fall.” The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and
breeze cradles them to the hour of harvest.
The air-like the tingle of water from a mountain-spring
in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense
of the dust of the world flushed away.
Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in
the shining yellow sea, are houses—sometimes
in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield.
Also rising here and there in the expanse, clouds
that wind skyward, spreading out in a powdery mist.
They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are
mightily devouring what their servants, the monster
steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still.
What was gold will still be a rusted gold, but near
to the earth-the stubble of the corn now lying in
vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.
Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip
of industrialists, whose determination to achieve
riches is, in spite of themselves, chastened by the
magnitude and orderly process of nature’s travail
which is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal
striving under a smother of white for many months
in every year, when what is now gold in the sun will
be a soft—sometimes, too, a hard-shining
coverlet like impacted wool. Then, instead of
the majestic clouds of incense from the threshers,
will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely
home. There the farmer rests till spring, comforting
himself in the thought that while he waits, far under
the snow the wheat is slowly expanding; and as in
April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the
sun, it will push upward and outward, green and vigorous,
greeting his eye with the “What cheer, partner!”
of a mate in the scheme of nature.
Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are
here—bright, singing birds, wide adventurous
rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the wood
and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping
in the stream, the plaint of the whippoorwill, the
call of the bluebird, the golden flash of the oriole,
the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
mallard from the sedge. And, more than all,
a human voice declaring by its joy in song that not
only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.
