XV

THROUGH THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

I HAVE come to that portion of my journeying and of my story where all day, every evening, and all night long I was conscious of the odour of mown clover, of fields of ambrosia.

I was tramping along the border of Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan, from Toledo to Angola, Indiana. I was entering the rich West. The fields were vast and square, the road was long and flat, and straight and quiet, the June haze hung over luxuriant meadows, and there was a wonderful silence and ripening peace over the country.

One evening, as the red sun sank into night-darkened mist, I talked with an old farmer, who was smoking his pipe at his gate.

"I came along this same road like you, with a bundle on my back, forty years ago," said he, "and I took work on a farm; then I rented a farm. Many's the lad I've seen go past of an evening. And one or two have stopped here and worked some days, for the matter of that."

The farmer had left England when he was a strip

ling, and I tried to talk to him of the old country, but he was not really interested. He did not want to go back.

That is the Colonial feeling.

Strange to plough all day, or sow or reap, and in the evening to return to the quiet, solitary house of wood beside the great red-painted barn and not want England or Europe, not be interested in it, not want anything more than you've got; to have the sun go down red and whisper nought, and the stars come up and the moon, and yet not yearn; to work, to eat, to market; to have children growing about you ripening in so many years, and corn springing up in the fields ripening in so many weeks; births, marriages, deaths, sowings, harvests. .

There is all the pathos of man's life in it.

I slept that night in the dry wayside hay, under the broad sky and the misty golden moon. It was a quiet night, warm and gentle. Earth held the wanderer in her cradle and rocked him to sleep.

They are kind people about here. Next morning as I sat by my fire a woman sent her son out to me with a quart of milk and a bag of cookies. And milk is a much commercialised business on this western road, the electric freight train carries nearly all the milk away in churns to Toledo. It was a very welcome talkative boy who brought out the milk. His father rented one-third of a section (213 acres),

but was now laid up with pneumonia. As a consequence of the father's illness the young children had to work very hard in the fields. And there was a sick cow on the farm on the farm-sick through eating rank clover. And the boy himself had had scarlet fever in the spring. The serving-girl had had to go away "to have her little baby," and the one that came in her place brought the fever.

"What's your name?" said I.

"Charles."

Cheerful little Charles. He had much responsibility on his shoulders.

There were some big farms along the road, and near Metamora I had the privilege of seeing a dozen cows milked simultaneously by a petrol engine, rubber tubes being fixed to their teats and the milk pumped out. It was astonishing, the matter-of-fact way in which the latest invention was applied to farm life. "It's rather ugly," said I.

"Well, what are you to do when labour is so scarce ?” was the reply.

Land is rich here, but labour is scarce. I fell in with a garrulous farmer who told me that land now sold at 150 dollars (£30) the acre, and that in a few years it would rise to 250 dollars. The days of large farmers were over. All the big ranches were being sold up, and the farmers were taking holdings that they could farm themselves without help. Labour