Although his host had talked
vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and
unnatural.
"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not
treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the
ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was something
to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and
who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.
One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to
him as he stood on the little porch before the house.
"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her arms
and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him
dissatisfied."
Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.
There had been tears in the wife's eyes.
In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating
with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where
they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new
place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of
his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the
threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day
after day.
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