it back in a continuously advancing wave.  Never had that yeoman’s joy of hearing the ripping of roots and the grating of iron against stones as the great oxen settled to their work, strained in their yokes and dragged the plow point through the bosom of the earth, been half so genuine and deep.  It was good to be alive, to sleep, to eat, to toil!  Cities had lost their charm.  David’s sin was no longer a withering and blasting, but a chastening and restraining memory.  His clearing was a kingdom, his cabin a palace, and he was soon to have a queen!  He had reserved his sowing for the last day of his self-imposed seclusion, which ended with the month of May.

On the day following, having accomplished his vow, he would go to the house of God and claim his bride!  This day he would devote to that solemn function of scattering the sacred seed of life’s chief support into the open furrow!

No wonder a feeling of devotion and awe came upon him as he prepared himself for his task; for perhaps there is not a single act in the whole economy of life better calculated to stir a thoughtful mind to its profoundest depths than the sowing of those golden grains which have within them the promise and potency of life.  Year after year, century after century, millions of men have gone forth in the light of the all-beholding and life-giving sun to cast into the bosom of the earth the sustenance of their children!  It is a sublime act of faith, and this sacrifice of a present for a future good, an actual for a potential blessing, is no less beautiful and holy because familiar and old.  The Divine Master himself could not contemplate it without emotion and was inspired by it to the utterance of one of his grandest parables.

And then the field itself inspired solemn reflections and noble pride in the mind of the sower.  It was his own!  He had carved it out of a wilderness!  Here was soil which had never been opened to the daylight.  Here was ground which perhaps for a thousand, and not unlikely for ten thousand years, should bring forth seed to the sower; and he had cleared it with his own hands!  Generations and centuries after he should have died and been forgotten, men would go forth into this field as he was doing to-day, to sow their seed and reap their harvests.

He slung his bag of grain over his shoulder and stepped forth from his cabin at the dawn of day.  The clearing he had made was an almost perfect circle.  All around it were the green walls of the forest with the great trunks of the beeches, white and symmetrical, standing like vast Corinthian columns supporting a green frieze upon which rested the lofty roof of the immense cathedral.  From the organ-loft the music of the morning breeze resounded, and from the choirs the sweet antiphonals of birds.  Odors of pine, of balsam, of violets, of peppermint, of fresh-plowed earth, of bursting life, were wafted across the vast nave from transept to transept, and floated like incense up to heaven.