That night the sand, so unstable, had moved beneath the pressure of an unusual tide.  The course of the channel had changed, and when the horse, treading confidently, had approached the edge, it stepped straight into deep water and, losing its balance, being also impeded by the cart, dragged with it the vehicle, the old blind man and the child to unavoidable death.  Their bodies had been recovered but too late.  “Let us pray,” added the minister, “for the mourners.”

To a child the fact of death is not very terrible, because the fact of life is not yet understood; but I never see in imagination the level and sad-coloured country of my childhood, stretching out of sight to the sea across an expanse of sand, a country whose pomp was in the heavens, whose hills were the clouds, without seeing also, journeying across it, an old blind man, a child, and a dumb creature, to disappear for ever under the wide sky, beneath the sun, within that great waste of waters.

The life of the poor, coloured outwardly with the same passivity and acceptance of their lot as the rest of visible nature, disciplined by the same forces which break the floods and the earth, remains for most of us querulous, ignoble, disappointing.  What can be said suggestive or profound of the life that is born, that labours its full day with its face to the ground, from which it looks for its sustenance, and at last is carried, spent, to the square ground which holds the memory and remains of the dead.

Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group, for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is accomplished within a tilled field.

Under a sky that is infinite and a heaven accessible to all, the poor “work for their living,” bowed always a little towards tragedy yet understanding joy, from the bitterness of life and death and the added anguish of ignorance drinking often their safety.

CHAPTER II

It was evening in the country at harvest-time, at that moment towards sundown when the light, about to be withdrawn, glows with a fulness of gold which makes it seem impossible that it can ever die.  The earth was heavy with fruition, every square field brimful of the ungathered harvest.  The heavy corn swayed almost by reason of its own weight.  A thunderstorm would beat it prostrate in an hour.  All the crops were full and good, some almost level with the low hedges.  Heat seemed to radiate from the yellow mass, that scorching heat which in autumn never seems to leave the earth, but to linger about the ground, surrounding the responsive and standing corn.  But the day had brought no heaviness to the sky, blue without a cloud, only a grave and increasing heat, a sun which blinded the eyes and seemed to take no account of anything save its steady purpose of ripening the fruit and grain.