“Father, how can you be so attached to a place where you have suffered such hardships?”

“But only think of the joy of it when I was able to build a big barn for the animals, and when year by year my livestock increased so that I was always having to add new extensions for housing them.  If I were not going to sell the place now, I should have to put a new roof on the barn.  This would have been just the time to do it—­ as soon as I’d finished with the sowing.”

“Father, you are to do your sowing in that land where some seeds fall among thorns, some on stony ground, some by the wayside, and some on good ground.”

“And the old cottage,” the farmer pursued, “which I built after the first hut, I had thought of pulling down this year, to put up a fine new dwelling house.  What’s to be done now with all the timber that we two hauled home in the winter?  It was mighty tough work getting it down.  The horses were hard driven, and so were we.”

The son began to feel troubled.  He thought his father was slipping away from him.  He feared that the old man was not going to offer his property to the Lord in the right spirit.  “Well,” he argued, “but what are new houses and barns as compared with the blessed privilege of living a pure life among people who are of one mind?”

“Hallelujah!” cried the father.  “Don’t you suppose I know that a wonderful portion has been allotted to us?  Am I not on my way to the works to sell my property to the Company?  When I come back this way everything will be gone, and I shall have nothing I can call mine.”

The son did not reply, but he was pleased to hear that his father still held to his decision.

Presently they came to a farm beautifully situated on a hill.  There was a white-painted dwelling house, with a balcony and a veranda, and round the house were tall poplars whose pretty silvery stems were swollen with sap.

“Look!” said the farmer.  “That was just the sort of house I meant to have—­with a veranda and a balcony and a lot of ornamental woodwork, and with just such a well-mown lawn in front.  Wouldn’t that have been nice, Gabriel?”

As the son said nothing, the farmer concluded that he must be tired of hearing about the farm, so he, too, lapsed into silence although his thoughts were still upon his home.  He wondered how the horses would fare with their new owners, and how things in general would be run on the place.  “My goodness!” he muttered under his breath, “I’m surely doing a foolish thing in selling out to a corporation!  They’ll go and cut down all the trees, and let the farm go to waste.  It would be just like them to allow the land to become marshy again, and to let the birch woods grow down into the fields.”