Chapter VI: Part 6

But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live among a people who are Commuters, and I have stood with them on the banks of the Ohio, according to the suggestion of one of our wisest philosophers (Josh Billings, I think), and, in order to see how well the world could get on without me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow current, pulled it out, and looked for the hole.

The placid stream flowed on.

So now, when the day’s work is done, I turn homeward here to Mullein Hill, and these early autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the stable, while four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow--“Bucksy” stories of the noble red-man; stories of Arthur and the Table Round, of Guyon and Britomart, and the heroes of old; and marvelous stories of that greatest hero of them all--their father, far away yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting things to do, and such fun doing them!

Now the world is so “full of a number of things”--things to do still, but things, instead of hands, and things instead of selves, so many things to do them with--even a _thing_ to milk with, now! But I will continue to use my hands.

No, I shall probably never become a great milk-contractor. I shall probably remain only a Commuter to the end. But if I never become anything great,--the Father of my Country, or the Father of Poetry, or the Father of Chemistry, or the Father of the Flying Machine,--why, I am at least the father of these four shining faces in the lantern light; and I have, besides them, handed down from the past, a few more of life’s old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle reader, with their simple old-fashioned blessings.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

U · S · A

End of Project Gutenberg's The Face of the Fields, by Dallas Lore Sharp