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Updated: May 8, 2025
It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren border-land, from the uncivilized mountains, standing sullen in the wild, shaggy chevelure of nature, and to walk again between towering hills dressed in the best toilet of human industry, crowned with golden wheatfields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest vegetation.
In the lanes where, as a young man, he had walked among wheatfields, trolley-cars whirled between rows of mills and factories. The children had grown to manhood, with children of their own. Like a ghost, he searched for house after house, where once he had been made welcome, only to find in its place a towering office building. "All had gone, the old familiar faces."
His windows looked out on the Aydelot wheatfields and the grove beyond, and every morning the sunrise across the level eastern prairie made a picture only the hand of the Infinite could paint. This morning he opened his eyes on a far different scene. The reveille became a call to arms and the troops fell into line ready for battle.
The sparrows have never had such a feast of grain as this year. Whole corners of wheatfields they work more at corners were cleared out as clean by them as if the wheat had been threshed as it stood. The sunshine of the autumn afternoons is faintly tawny, and the long grass by the wayside takes from it a tawny undertone.
The men were working so hard in the wheatfields that they did not notice the heat though I was kept busy carrying water for them and grandmother and Antonia had so much to do in the kitchen that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Antonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner.
The house was a dignified old affair, built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and corn-stacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army.
Meanwhile one saw the President, aided by a score of able and energetic men, constantly at work removing stones in the path, setting up a War Industries Board, reorganising the Shipping Board and the Air Service, and clearing the way for those food supplies from the great American and Canadian wheatfields without which Europe could not endure, and which were constantly endangered by the pressure of the submarine attack.
Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of dreadful warfare. As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley's patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch.
Hence the lord of the manor buys his partridges and his hares by sacrificing the bread of his tenants, and so long as the members of "Sparrow Clubs" are forbidden to follow higher game, they will suicidally revenge themselves by destroying the birds which protect their wheatfields.
"If these are virtues, they're strictly negative ones," Flora pointed out. "I'm clearing the ground," said Edgar. "Where we shine is in making the most of material things, turning, for example, these wilds into wheatfields, holding on through your Arctic cold and blazing summer heat.
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