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He conjectured that the fallen rider, with his broken leg, would avoid the dry harvest-fields, over which the fire was rapidly spreading, and would be found in the moist ditch beside the road. Nor was he wrong in this surmise. He was soon saluted in a voice that he recognised. "Gipsy, come here!" "Not so fast," the fiddler replied. "How do I know you won't shoot me?"
Picturesquely speaking, Kachahurda is a disgrace to the neighborhood in which it stands; its mud hovels are combined cow-pens, chicken-coops, and human habitations, and they are bunched up together without any pretence to order or regularity; yet the light-hearted, decently-clad people, whose songs come floating from the harvest-fields, live contentedly in this and other equally wretched villages round about.
During the four years that I was in the University, I earned enough in the harvest-fields during the long summer vacations to carry me through the balance of each year, working very hard, cutting with a cradle four acres of wheat a day, and helping to put it in the shock.
Yet God on them His sun and rain doth evermore bestow, And ripens all their harvest-fields and pleasant fruits also. For them He makes the deer and moose, for them the fishes swim, And all the fowls in woods and air are goodly gifts from Him. Yea, more; for them, as for ourselves, hath Christ a ransom paid, And on Himself, their sins and ours, a common burden laid.
"Yes, he's ever so far away," was his reply, as he turned half lazily to the open doorway. Neither spoke for a moment. The eyes of both were on the distant harvest-fields. Vaguely, not decisively, the hazy, indolent air of summer was broken by the lazy droning of the locusts and grasshoppers.
Large districts of country had gone to waste, and cane-brakes and squalid morasses usurped the place of yellow harvest-fields.
I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew the reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for miles each way.
Now he had to wear thick shoes on the hill of Maam or sweat like a common son of the shore in the harvest-fields. At night upon his pillow in the barn loft he would lie and mourn for unreturning days and loud and clamorous experience. Or at morning ere he started the work of the day he would ascend the little tulloch behind the house and look far off at a patch of blue the inner arm of the ocean.
From the close air of crowded cities, from thronged temples and synagogues, where priest and Levite kept up a show of worship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for their emptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone, He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clear Eastern heavens, on the breezy tops of mountains, in the shade of fruit- trees, by the side of fountains, and through yellow harvest-fields, enforcing the lessons of His divine morality by comparisons and parables suggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of social humanity, the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, the sower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage.
Beautiful, no doubt, are all the forms of Nature, when transfigured by the miraculous power of poetry; hamlets and harvest-fields, and nut-brown waters, flowing ever under the forest, vast and shadowy, with all the sights and sounds of rural life. But after all, what are these but the decorations and painted scenery in the great theatre of human life?
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