One for the blackbird,
One for the crow,
One for the cutworm,
Two to grow.

But after a time one ceases to count five, and feels five, instinctively rejecting a monstrous six, or returning to complete an inferior four.

I wonder if you know the feel of the fresh, soft soil, as it answers to your steps, giving a little, responding a little (as life always does)—­and is there not something endlessly good and pleasant about it?  And the movement of the arms and shoulders, falling easily into that action and reaction which yields the most service to the least energy!  Scientists tell us that the awkward young eagle has a wider wing-stretch than the old, skilled eagle.  So the corn planter, at noon, will do his work with half the expended energy of the early morning:  he attains the artistry of motion.  And quite beyond and above this physical accomplishment is the ever-present, scarcely conscious sense of reward, repayment, which one experiences as he covers each planting of seeds.

As the sun rose higher the mists stole secretly away, first toward the lower brook-hollows, finally disappearing entirely; the morning coolness passed, the tops of the furrows dried out to a lighter brown, and still I followed the long planting.  At each return I refilled my seed-bag, and sometimes I drank from the jug of water which I had hidden in the grass.  Often I stood a moment by the fence to look up and around me.  Through the clear morning air I could hear the roosters crowing vaingloriously from the barnyard, and the robins were singing, and occasionally from the distant road I heard the rumble of a wagon.  I noted the slow kitchen smoke from Horace’s chimney, the tip of which I could just see over the hill from the margin of my field—­and my own pleasant home among its trees—­and my barn—­all most satisfying to look upon.  Then I returned to the sweat and heat of the open field, and to the steady swing of the sowing.

[Illustration:  “OFTEN I STOOD A MOMENT BY THE FENCE”]

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen.  All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do.  In the advertisements of the country paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich—­overnight—­by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers.  It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures.  We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly!—­not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry.