“Thanks,” said Sidney; “what delicious milk.”
“Yes—Boss don’t give chalk and water, she don’t,” said Miss Tribbey, and went off to her kitchen.
“A poor, slim jack of a man,” she soliloquised, ladling out her jelly. “My soul! There’s a mighty difference between him and Lanty—but there—his kind don’t grow on every bush. Clear Lansing he is, through and through, and there never was no runts among the Lansings.”
For a few minutes Sidney rested in the porch, his eyes dwelling upon the undulating grain before him. To one more experienced in these matters, its burnished gold would have told sad tales of the terrible drouth which had scorched the country side, but to him it appeared the very emblem of peace and plenty.
What field of the cloth of gold was ever equal in splendour to this?
He rose and passed down the dusty road. Upon one hand the panicles of an oat field whispered together, upon the other stretched the barren distances of a field known far and near as Mullein Meadow, these weeds and hard shiny goat grass being all that grew upon it.
Sidney did not grasp the significance of its picturesque grey boulders, nor think how dear a possession it was at the price of the taxes upon it. After Mullein Meadow came a little wood, thick with underbrush, in the shadow of which a few brackens were yet green; and fronting the wood a hayfield, with a patch of buckwheat in full bloom in one corner, showing against the dim greenness of the hay like a fragrant white handkerchief fallen from an angel’s hand.
Sidney cut across the hayfield to where a glistening point glimmered in the sunshine, above a sloping roof set on brown walls.
“‘How curious. How real!’” he said to himself. “‘Underfoot the divine soil—Overhead the sun.’”
He reached the enclosure in which the house stood, and paused at the gate to watch the groups of men discussing their purchases, for the sale was over.
Presently, his interest urging him, he entered, and mingled with the others, having the fanciful idea he would know his father’s old friend by intuition. His eyes softened as he looked at the weather-beaten faces and hard-wrought hands of these men. The memory of the golden grain was dimmed a little, and he saw bands of men bending above their toil beneath stern skies, “storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil.” But that vision was illy entertained in his sanguine, idealistic imagination. It was dismissed to give place once more to the “free farmer” of song and story, and as if to bear witness to this latter picture, a young man detached himself somewhat impatiently from a group of his fellows, and advancing towards where Sidney stood, flung himself across a mettlesome roan which was tugging viciously at its bridle as it stood tied beneath a tree.