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Psychologists are fascinated by the career of this adventurer who ploughed so deep a furrow in the field of European history; but in seeking to detach the monk from his background, we run the risk of entirely failing to comprehend the mystery of his influence, itself the product of a complex and little understood environment.
I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy; nevertheless, as good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a man, and very soon I had to become a good ploughman, or rather ploughboy. None could draw a straighter furrow.
A tremor passed over Lord Valleys' heart. What intensity of feeling there was in the fellow, that he could look like this at the first breath of opposition! He reached out and took up the cigar-box; held it absently towards his son, and drew it quickly back. "I forgot," he said; "you don't." And lighting a cigar, he smoked gravely, looking straight before him, a furrow between his brows.
In a few minutes the hunter and Wilbur had fastened their horses and presently were beside the fire. To the boy's surprise the old hunter made no attack upon the fire itself, but, going in advance of it some hundred feet, with the boy's hoe, which he dragged after him like a plow, made a furrow in the earth almost as rapidly as a man could walk. This, Wilbur, with ax and shovel, widened.
When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting and gold-hunting.
After three weeks' endurance, the man I had hired to help mutinied, and stated plainly that he had no intention of either wearing himself to skin and bone or unmercifully overworking dumb cattle, but I found satisfaction in toiling on alone, often until after the lingering darkness fell, for each fathom of rich black clod added to the long furrow seemed to lessen the distance that divided me from Grace.
No one could do a better day's work or drive a straighter furrow, and he was proud of it, and proud of his team three iron-greys, with white manes and tails, called "Pleasant", "Old Pleasant", and "Young Pleasant." Yet though he did his ploughing well, it by no means occupied all his mind.
It has been worn into a deep furrow some twenty or thirty feet from the top, horizontal and running its entire length. The whole cliff overhangs its base. The entire groove has been occupied as a refuge, and there have been excavations in the back of the groove for additional chambers. In front, moreover, there must have been a balcony of wood, sustained by beams and props.
The floor of the room was of shining inlaid wood; there were beautifully woven mats all round; stands made of red lacquer work, and seats of cane and bamboo; and there was a round window, through which could be seen a beautiful garden, full of flowering shrubs and trees, a clear pond lined with coloured tiles in the middle, and over the wall the gilded roof of a pagoda, like an umbrella, only all in ridge and furrow, and with a little bell at every spoke.
We have already learned how the plateau grew to its present extent through the outpouring of successive floods of lava which swept around the higher mountains like an ocean. Many cañons furrow the eastern slope of the Cascade Range, and terminate in the greater cañon of the Columbia at the edge of the lava.
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