It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of the land.  While it is patient, it never waits long for you.  There is a chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for harvesting.  You accept the gauge thrown down—­well and good, you shall have a chance to fight!  You do not accept it?  There is no complaint.  The land cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and pig-weed—­and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you.

Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a small piece of land at second hand.  To be accepted as One Who Belongs, there must be sweat and weariness.

The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in four years ago.  We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt, about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then throwing in gravel.  It was a bright, cool afternoon.  In the field below a ploughman was at work:  I could see the furrows of the dark earth glisten as he turned it over.  The grass in the meadow was a full rich green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the cluck of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed green.  And as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling of coming somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own land.  For titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor with money changing from one hand to another, but for true possession one must work and serve according to the most ancient law.  There is no mitigation and no haggling of price.  Those who think they can win the greatest joys of country life on any easier terms are mistaken.

But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it, and planted it and harvested it—­even though it be only a few acres—­ how he comes to know and to love every rod of it.  He knows the wet spots, and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots —­until his acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every characteristic he knows.  It is so also that he comes to know his horses and cattle and pigs and hens.  It is a fine thing, on a warm day in early spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their first flight in the sunshine.  What cleanly folk they are!  And later to see them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows!  It is a fine thing to watch the cherries and plum trees come into blossom, with us about the first of May, while all the remainder of the orchard seems still sleeping.  It is a fine thing to see the cattle turned for the first time in spring into the green meadows.  It is a fine thing—­one of the finest of all—­to see and smell the rain in a corn-field after weeks of drought.  How it comes softly out of gray skies, the first drops throwing up spatters of dust and losing themselves in the dry soil.  Then the clouds sweep