148 THE COW 



swallowed up within the barn. I am mowing it 

 away. It is hot up here under the roof, as hot 

 perhaps as in the steel furnaces where it is the 

 fashion to pity the men who toil. It takes only a 

 few moments to unload hay by modem methods, 

 but it means dust and sweat and weariness. 



So I am moved to a hay-mow meditation. Some- 

 times our business seems a curiously futile per- 

 formance, like traveling always in a circle. All 

 the growing season from April to November we 

 toil to grow and gather the crops that shall fill 

 the great barns and silos. And then all the re- 

 mainder of the year wfe devote to feeding out the 

 crops we have gathered with such pains, and when 

 spring comes we have always what we had the 

 year before, — an empty bam. And always in fair 

 weather and foul we milk the cows. Does it not 

 seem a bootless task? Sometimes perhaps I ask 

 myself this question. Yet I remember : Take care 

 of the soil and the soil will take care of you. For 

 a hundred years and more my people have worked 

 for this old hill farm, and have lived by it and on 

 the whole it has answered to their care. A hundred 

 years ago it sent a boy to college and it is sending 

 boys and girls to college still. Of the by-gone men 

 who tilled it, none ate the bread of idleness and 

 none has known want. I like to remember that 

 out of its soil for all those years has been nourished 

 a wholesome civilization and a generous life. 



