“’Tis the eye of sense we see with,” remarked Reuben quietly.

“Eh, an’ ’tis the eye of sense you’re weak in,” responded old Adam.  “I knew a blind man once that had a pictur of the world in his mind jest as smooth an’ pretty as the views you see on the backs of calendars—­with all the stink-weeds an’ the barren places left out of it—­an’ he used to talk to us seein’ ones for all the earth as if he were better acquainted with natur than we were.”

“I ain’t larned an’ I never pretended to be,” said Reuben, piously, “but the Lord has used me well in His time an’ I’m thankful to Him.”

“Now that’s monstrous odd,” commented the ancient cynic, “for lookin’ at it from the outside, I’d say He’d used you about as bad as is His habit in general.”

He rose from the bench, and dusted the seat of his blue overalls, while he gazed sentimentally over the blossoming orchard. “’Tis the seventeenth of April, so we may git ahead with plantin’,” he remarked.  “Ah, well, it’s a fine early spring an’ puts me in mind of seventy years ago when I was courtin’.  Thar ain’t many men, I reckon, that can enjoy lookin’ back on a courtin’ seventy years after it is over.  ’Tis surprisin’ how some things sweeten with age, an’ memory is one of ’em.”

Reuben merely nodded after him as he went, for he had grown too tired to answer.  A curious stillness—­half happiness, half indifference—­was stealing over him, and he watched as in a dream, the blue figure of old Adam hobble over the sun-flecked path through the orchard.  A few minutes later Molly flitted after the elder, and Reuben’s eyes followed her with the cheerful look with which he had faced seventy years of life.  On a rush mat in the sunshine the old hound flicked his long black ear at a fly of which he was dreaming, and from a bower of ivy in the eaves there came the twitter of sparrows.  Beyond the orchard, the wind, blowing from the marshes, chased the thin, sketchy shadows over the lawn at Jordan’s Journey.

While he sat there Reuben began to think, and as always, his thoughts were humble and without self-consciousness.  As he looked under the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life stretching before him—­seventy years—­all just the same except that with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future.  At the end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with a great hope for something—­he hardly knew what—­that would make things different.  He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never happened.  Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had died in the earth.  He remembered all the things he had wanted that he had never had—­all the other things he had not wanted that had made up his life.  Never had