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Indeed, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the great doctor, in his lecture on 'Sleep, argues that all things that grow at all grow in the night. Night is Nature's growing-time. Now Michael Fairless shared Richard Jefferies' fondness for mushrooms. Every reader of The Roadmender will recall the night in the woods.
However, on August 15, in a thicket at the foot of a slope running down from the road that passes through the district of Millery, about ten miles from Lyons, a roadmender, attracted by a peculiar smell, discovered the remains of what appeared to be a human body. They were wrapped in a cloth, but so decomposed as to make identification almost impossible.
I have attained my ideal: I am a roadmender, some say stonebreaker. Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other. All day I sit by the roadside on a stretch of grass under a high hedge of saplings and a tangle of traveller's joy, woodbine, sweetbrier, and late roses.
"Read me a sermon in stone," he said, simply; and I stayed my hand to read. He listened with courteous intelligence. "You hold a roadmender has a vocation?" he asked. "As the monk or the artist, for, like both, he is universal. The world is his home; he serves all men alike, ay, and for him the beasts have equal honour with the men.
If I take Lily for my heroine after all, I shall be following a noble precedent Michael Fairless, in The Roadmender, did something very much like it. 'In early spring, she says, 'I took a long tramp. Towards afternoon, tired and thirsty, I sought water at a little lonely cottage.
He exchanged the time of day with the clerks hurrying to the railroad station; he did not disdain to ask the roadmender, seated on a pile of stones, how his labor was getting on, and where he would work next week; he leaned on the gate to listen as if enrapt to the groom and gardener of a neighbor of Clemenceau's, regretting that the hubbub of cracking guns and other ominous explosions was driving their master from home.
We are 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice' because we have all that we need, and yet we taste the life and poverty of the very poor. We are, if you will, uncloistered monks, preaching friars who speak not with the tongue, disciples who hear the wise words of a silent master." "Robert Louis Stevenson was a roadmender," said the wise parson. "Ay, and with more than his pen," I answered.
It dries up every winter and flows through the summer, gushing forth on the same day of every year, except once, when a goose took possession of the empty bed and hatched her brood there. That time the water did not flow until she got away with her progeny. But the most grewsome story of the place is that of the Indian whose skull was found by a roadmender.
Railroad president and roadmender devote themselves to activities which satisfy the wants of their fellows. Their service is direct. In return for their hours of time and their calories of energy, they receive a share of the product which they have helped to produce. "The individual who receives a return because of his property ownership, receives a property income.
Very early in the morning I hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings, and the tap, tap, of little beaks upon the stone. The sound carries me back, for it was the first to greet me when I rose to draw water and gather kindling in my roadmender days; and if I slip back another decade they survey me, reproving my laziness, from the foot of the narrow bed in my little attic overseas.
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