The man at the plow was thinking:  “What a farm you’ve got!  Many well-timbered houses, fine cattle and horses, and servants who are as good as gold.  At least you are as well-to-do as any one in these parts, so you’ll never have to face poverty.

“But it’s not poverty that I fear,” he said, as if in answer to his own thought.  “I should be satisfied were I only as good a man as my father or my father’s father.  What could have put such silly nonsense into your head?” he wondered.  “And a moment ago you were feeling so happy.  Ponder well this one thing:  in father’s time all the neighbours were guided by him in all their undertakings.  The morning he began haymaking they did likewise and the day we started in to plow our fallow field at the Ingmar Farm, plows were put in the earth the length and breadth of the valley.  Yet here I’ve been plowing now for two hours and more without any one having so much as ground a plowshare.

“I believe I have managed this farm as well as any one who has borne the name of Ingmar Ingmarsson,” he mused.  “I can get more for my hay than father ever got for his, and I’m not satisfied to let the weed-choked ditches which crossed the farm in his time remain.  What’s more, no one can say that I misuse the woodlands as he did by converting them into burn-beaten land.

“There are times when all this seems hard to bear,” said the young man.  “I can’t always take it as lightly as I do to-day.  When father and grandfather lived, folks used to say that the Ingmarssons had been on earth such a long time that they must know what was pleasing to our Lord.  Therefore the people fairly begged them to rule over the parish.  They appointed both parson and sexton; they determined when the river should be dredged, and where gaols should be built.  But me no one consults, nor have I a say in anything.

“It’s wonderful, all the same, that troubles can be so easily borne on a morning like this.  I could almost laugh at them.  And still I fear that matters will be worse than ever for me in the fall.  If I should do what I’m now thinking of doing, neither the parson nor the judge will shake hands with me when we meet at the church on a Sunday, which is something they have always done up to the present.  I could never hope to be made a guardian of the poor, nor could I even think of becoming a churchwarden.”

Thinking is never so easy as when one follows a plow up a furrow and down a furrow.  You are quite alone, and there is nothing to distract you but the crows hopping about picking up worms.  The thoughts seemed to come to the man as readily as if some one had whispered them into his ear.  Only on rare occasions had he been able to think as quickly and clearly as on that day, and the thought of it gladdened and encouraged him.  It occurred to him that he was giving himself needless anxiety; that no one expected him to plunge headlong into misery.  He thought that if his father were only living now, he would ask his advice in this matter, as he had always done in the old days when grave questions had come up.