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Updated: June 20, 2025
Who can tell what it may prove when it has been ploughed with the plough of suffering, when the rains of sorrow, the frosts of pain, and the winds of poverty have moistened and swelled and dried its fallow clods? Mercy had not such a sweet temper as her sister, but she was not so selfish. She was readier to take offence, perhaps just because she was less self-satisfied.
Beds can be spaded as soon as the frost is out of the ground, as advised in the chapter on The Garden of Annuals, but, as was said in that chapter, it is not advisable to do more with them at that time. If the ground is worked over when wet, the only result is that you get a good many small clods to take the place of large ones. Nothing is gained by being in a hurry with this part of the work.
Sometimes as part of, sometimes in addition to, the week-work and the boon-work, the villain was required to plough so many acres in the fall and spring; to mow, toss, and carry in the hay from so many acres; to haul and scatter so many loads of manure; carry grain to the barn or the market, build hedges, dig ditches, gather brush, weed grain, break clods, drive sheep or swine, or any other of the forms of agricultural labor as local custom on each manor had established his burdens.
Shall I no more hear that voice which was always so sweet; no more see that smile which awakened up such joy in my soul! Must that beloved form be lost forever among the clods in the valley. And those godlike virtues, shall they pass away like the empty visions of the night!"
And something of the same dissatisfaction, though more tinged with melancholy, has been felt by many who stood beside the closing grave and heard the same bird-music making harsh discord with the rumbling of the clods falling on the lid of the coffin, and who saw the pleasant sunshine tinging the very sods that were in a few moments to form an impassable barrier between the beloved dead and the miserable living.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.
After one of these lectures, Newbury returning home at night from Coryston was pelted with stones and clods by men posted behind a hedge. He was only slightly hurt, and when Marcia tried to speak of it, his smile of frank contempt put the matter by. She could only be thankful that Coryston was still away. For Lady Coryston, meanwhile, the Betts case scarcely existed.
As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out, while old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in their footsteps safe and free, and start into life, and claim its own when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors; so, I have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood refined and ennobled, in my mother, into royalty.
I cast myself on the grass-covered mould, and pressed it to my bosom, as if there was vitality in the cold clods. "Oh, my mother!" I exclaimed, and strange and dreary sounded my voice in that breathing stillness. "Has God heard thy prayers? Will he hear the cries of the fatherless? Will he have pity on my forsaken youth?"
And as the great Night-Hound past me, it tore the earth and the bushes, with the exceeding strength that it put forth to run, and clods of the earth and stones of bigness were cast this way and that by the feet of the Hound, running. And so shall you have a little knowledge of the strength of that Beast. And the Hound ran on into the distance, and presently, I heard it baying in the Night.
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