—­So I dug.  There is something fine in hard physical labour, straight ahead:  no brain used, just muscles.  I stood ankle-deep in the cool water:  every spadeful came out with a smack, and as I turned it over at the edge of the ditch small turgid rivulets coursed back again.  I did not think of anything in particular.  I dug.  A peculiar joy attends the very pull of the muscles.  I drove the spade home with one foot, then I bent and lifted and turned with a sort of physical satisfaction difficult to describe.  At first I had the cool of the morning, but by seven o’clock the day was hot enough!  I opened the breast of my shirt, gave my sleeves another roll, and went at it again for half an hour, until I dripped with perspiration.

“I will knock off,” I said, so I used my spade as a ladder and climbed out of the ditch.  Being very thirsty, I walked down through the marshy valley to the clump of alders which grows along the creek.  I followed a cow-path through the thicket and came to the creek side, where I knelt on a log and took a good long drink.  Then I soused my head in the cool stream, dashed the water upon my arms and came up dripping and gasping!  Oh, but it was fine!

So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where I sat down comfortably and stretched my legs.  There is a poem in stretched legs—­after hard digging—­but I can’t write it, though I can feel it!  I got my bag and took out a half loaf of Harriet’s bread.  Breaking off big crude pieces, I ate it there in the shade.  How rarely we taste the real taste of bread!  We disguise it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk or fruit.  We even soak it with gravy (here in the country where we aren’t at all polite—­but very comfortable), so that we never get the downright delicious taste of the bread itself.  I was hungry this morning and I ate my half loaf to the last crumb—­and wanted more.  Then I lay down for a moment in the shade and looked up into the sky through the thin outer branches of the hawthorn.  A turkey buzzard was lazily circling cloud-high above me:  a frog boomed intermittently from the little marsh, and there were bees at work in the blossoms.

—­I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, to the work.  It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn off.  But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again.  One becomes a sort of machine—­unthinking, mechanical:  and yet intense physical work, though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the consciousness.  I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long afterward every separate step in a task.

It is curious, hard physical labour!  One actually stops thinking.  I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself—­down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it—­and repeat.  And yet sometimes—­mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired—­I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me—­a sense of its beauty and its meanings—­giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is near complete content—­