HAYING TIME 



work now and then is relished by the wisest men. 

 I wished to set you a good example, my boy. 

 Look at my hands.&quot; 



But you cannot deceive a boy with that kind 

 of hypocrisy. He looked at me straight, and 

 said, &quot;Say, Dad, you re sleepy, ain t you?&quot; 



The blessed vacuity of being tired on the right 

 side was a novelty, and it was fraught with a dull 

 kind of satisfaction that at last I had arrived at 

 that condition in which, like the yellow dog, I 

 could drop down at a moment s notice and forget 

 obediently. When you are physically tired, you 

 take a header into sleep with a recklessness that 

 is juvenile, and the moment you let go everything, 

 Nature sets to work to fix things up thoroughly 

 and noiselessly, so that when you wake up the 

 next morning there isn t anything to remember. 

 You cannot do this when you are mentally tired. 

 The mind runs on with its artificial momentum 

 in spite of sleep. I could not even hear the clack 

 of that reaper, and how often the tick of the tele 

 graph had danced through my head the livelong 

 night. 



And this is the whole lesion that recupera 

 tion means getting away from yourself. I remem 

 ber reading in Montaigne long ago that a man 

 may travel the world over like a fugitive without 

 escaping from himself. Now I found out that a 

 man cannot do an honest day s work at haying 

 without leaving a good deal of himself behind. 



It occurs to me now that it happened to be 

 cherry year that July, and cherry year does not 



59 



