an instant to comfort me where I lay, but I could see that their minds were still upon the running and I was glad when they went away.  I cannot tell with what weariness their haste oppressed me.  As for them, they somehow blamed me for dropping out.  I knew.  Until we ourselves understand, we accept no excuse from the man who stops.  While I felt it all, I was not bitter.  I did not seem to care.  I said to myself:  “This is Unfitness.  I survive no longer.  So be it.”

Thus I lay, and presently I began to hunger and thirst.  Desire rose within me:  the indescribable longing of the convalescent for the food of recovery.  So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required.  One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul.  It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy.  So vividly the memory came to me—­the high airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—­that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years.  Then I thought of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me rising still, cool, mysterious, and the fields in front stretching away in illimitable pleasantness.  I thought of the good smell of cows at milking—­you do not know, if you do not know!—­I thought of the sights and sounds, the heat and sweat of the hay fields.  I thought of a certain brook I knew when a boy that flowed among alders and wild parsnips, where I waded with a three-foot rod for trout.  I thought of all these things as a man thinks of his first love.  Oh, I craved the soil.  I hungered and thirsted for the earth.  I was greedy for growing things.

And thus, eight years ago, I came here like one sore-wounded creeping from the field of battle.  I remember walking in the sunshine, weak yet, but curiously satisfied.  I that was dead lived again.  It came to me then with a curious certainty, not since so assuring, that I understood the chief marvel of nature hidden within the Story of the Resurrection, the marvel of plant and seed, father and son, the wonder of the seasons, the miracle of life.  I, too, had died:  I had lain long in darkness, and now I had risen again upon the sweet earth.  And I possessed beyond others a knowledge of a former existence, which I knew, even then, I could never return to.

For a time, in the new life, I was happy to drunkenness—­working, eating, sleeping.  I was an animal again, let out to run in green pastures.  I was glad of the sunrise and the sunset.  I was glad at noon.  It delighted me when my muscles ached with work and when, after supper, I could not keep my eyes open for sheer weariness.  And sometimes I was awakened in the night out of a sound sleep—­seemingly by the very silences—­and lay in a sort of bodily comfort impossible to describe.

I did not want to feel or to think:  I merely wanted to live.  In the sun or the rain I wanted to go out and come in, and never again know the pain of the unquiet spirit.  I looked forward to an awakening not without dread for we are as helpless before birth as in the presence of death.