Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/727

Rh to his shack, but he was in despair. That had come which he had foreseen. All day he sat on a ledge of stone near his shack, reflecting. It was a beautiful day in spring, and a sudden warm spell had brought out the leaves on the trees. His feet were sunken in a bed of wild flowers. He heard running water and pipes of birds, and it seemed to him that he also heard something else—the trumpet of freedom of life and earth which calls a man to the battle-field of God. But he knew that the time was come when he must return to the trammels of love and happiness and anxiety, which his day and generation had made incumbent upon him, and which, although his soul after a manner delighted in them, were yet not the best for a man of his kind who had in him the memory of the old which is the new.

It was late afternoon when Adam rose up and entered his shack and got out a razor and a bit of looking-glass which he had kept all this time, and he shaved himself and cut his hair. Then he put on a decent suit of clothes which he had also kept, and when it was all done he looked a thin and meek man, and not one to ever kick over his traces of life. Then he left his shack, and went along the road toward his old home. He stopped at the house of a man who owned a mule, a half-mile from his own home, and found the man's wife at home, and bargained with her, with a little money he had left, for the hire of the mule for a few days. These people were newcomers in the settlement and did not know him, but the woman looked at him wonderingly when he told her what fields he wished to plough.

"But," she said, "I thought that man was dead. I thought he ran away and died."

"No," said Adam, "he is alive."

"But they told me he died," persisted the woman." [sic]

"No, he is alive."

"Are you him?" asked the woman.

"Yes, I am," replied Adam, and left the woman gaping after him as he went away with the mule. She half feared that she had seen a ghost; then she looked at the solid silver in her hand.

Adam went on, leading the mule with his ragged sides. He was a strong mule, although he showed those ragged patches. Adam went, when he had reached his old home, into the barn and got the plough, and the dog strained at his leash to get at him, barking with joy.

Adam's wife and children in the house heard the dog bark and ran out, and there was Adam ploughing the field,—a small, meek-faced man with an expression of sublime patience and love. Adam's wife screamed.

"It is your father come back!" she cried out. Then she and the slender young girls and the little boys all ran out in the field and up to Adam, and he turned from his ploughing and clasped his wife and then his children in his arms, and his face was beaming, and his heart aching with excess of joy, and his leash was upon him again.

But he still had the sense of blessing which had come to him from his wrestling with that which was the holiest and best of earth and humanity, but which had come between himself and the best of himself.



