He was mad
on instinct, I reckon! And you drove off the road on instinct. Beware
instinct,' say I on the authority aforesaid. It would have smoothed
matters all out if the Bunker boys had got that salt!"
CHAPTER XVI
THE FEWKESES IN CLOVER AT BLUE-GRASS MANOR
Iowa lived in the future in those days. It was a land of poverty and
privations and small things, but a land of dreams. We shivered in the
winter storms, and dreamed; we plowed and sowed and garnered in; but the
great things, the happy things, were our dreams and visions. We felt
that we were plowing the field of destiny and sowing for the harvest of
history; but we scarcely thought it. The power that went out of us as we
scored that wonderful prairie sod and built those puny towns was the
same power that nerved the heart of those who planted Massachusetts and
Rhode Island and Virginia, the power that has thrilled the world
whenever the white man has gone forth to put a realm under his feet.
Our harvest of that day seems pitifully small as I sit on my veranda and
look at my barns and silos, and see the straight rows of corn leaning
like the characters of God's handwriting across the broad intervale of
Vandemark's Folly flat, sloping to the loving pressure of the steady
warm west wind of Iowa, and clapping a million dark green hands in
acclamation of the full tide of life sucked up from the richest breast
that Mother Earth in all her bountiful curves turns to the lips of her
offspring.
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