“Harriet,” I said, “you and Ann Spencer are benefactors of the human race.”

“Go ’way now,” said Ann Spencer, shaking all over with pleasure, “and eat your shortcake.”

And after dinner how pleasant it was to stretch at full length for a few minutes on the grass in the shade of the maple tree and look up through the dusky thick shadows of the leaves.  If ever a man feels the blissfulness of complete content it is at such a moment—­every muscle in the body deliciously resting, and a peculiar exhilaration animating the mind to quiet thoughts.  I have heard talk of the hard work of the hay-fields, but I never yet knew a healthy man who did not recall many moments of exquisite pleasure connected with the hardest and the hottest work.

I think sometimes that the nearer a man can place himself in the full current of natural things the happier he is.  If he can become a part of the Universal Process and know that he is a part, that is happiness.  All day yesterday I had that deep quiet feeling that I was somehow not working for myself, not because I was covetous for money, nor driven by fear, not surely for fame, but somehow that I was a necessary element in the processes of the earth.  I was a primal force!  I was the indispensable Harvester.  Without me the earth could not revolve!

Oh, friend, there are spiritual values here, too.  For how can a man know God without yielding himself fully to the processes of God?

I lived yesterday.  I played my part.  I took my place.  And all hard things grew simple, and all crooked things seemed straight, and all roads were open and clear before me.  Many times that day I paused and looked up from my work knowing that I had something to be happy for.

At one o’clock Dick and I lagged our way unwillingly out to work again—­rusty of muscles, with a feeling that the heat would now surely be unendurable and the work impossibly hard.  The scythes were oddly heavy and hot to the touch, and the stones seemed hardly to make a sound in the heavy noon air.  The cows had sought the shady pasture edges, the birds were still, all the air shook with heat.  Only man must toil!

“It’s danged hot,” said Dick conclusively.

How reluctantly we began the work and how difficult it seemed compared with the task of the morning!  In half an hour, however, the reluctance passed away and we were swinging as steadily as we did at any time in the forenoon.  But we said less—­if that were possible—­and made every ounce of energy count.  I shall not here attempt to chronicle all the events of the afternoon, how we finished the mowing of the field and how we went over it swiftly and raked the long windrows into cocks, or how, as the evening began to fall, we turned at last wearily toward the house.  The day’s work was done.

Dick had stopped whistling long before the middle of the afternoon, but now as he shouldered his scythe he struck up “My Fairy Fay” with some marks of his earlier enthusiasm.