It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings. However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow, Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled and ringed about with petticoats—like a tree within its layers of bark—that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women; for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it.
"We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples, and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens, and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes. One evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the countersign.
"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"
She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.
"It is 'Peace,'" she said. "But I desert to the enemy."
Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable; for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.
Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the
divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine
right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in
winter. It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who
dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind—dwell on and on in affection, submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor, their sustenance, or their life.
Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over
the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and
lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled
and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted
fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing
their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to
leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost
of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful, trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!
What joy at nightfall to gather them home to food and warmth and rest! If there is ever a time when I feel myself a mediaeval lord to trusty vassals, it is then. Of a truth I pass entirely over the Middle Ages, joining my life to the most ancient dwellers of the plains, and becoming a simple father of flocks and herds. When they have been duly stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and petitions responds to that laughter of the corn! What squeals and grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric! What a blowing of mellow horns from the cows! And the quick nostril trumpet-call of the horse, how eager, how dependent, yet how commanding! As I mount to the top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven and earth.
Or I love to catch up the bundles of oats as they are thrown down from
the loft and send them whirling through the cutting-box so fast that
they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or, grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ricks over the mangers with the rich aromatic hay until I am as warm as when I loaded the wagons with it at midsummer noons.
With what sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled! How
robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts! In what comfort of mind I
can turn to my own roof and store!
This hour in my stable is the only one out of the twenty-four left to
me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world
of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to
gratify Georgiana. I think little enough of this business otherwise. Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing my legs through my pantaloons of a morning. But a man can study nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.