Peter finally quartered himself upon a lonely farm in Worcestershire. The estate was large and wild, running down steep hills and banks to a brook and tiny falls of water. The family who owned it scraped a livelihood from odds and ends of country employment. They had some orchard, and pasture for half a dozen cows. But there was no arable, and they made up a yearly deficit by receiving visitors from the town.

Peter had the place to himself, and the peace of it was deeply refreshing. The house stood high, whence the shapely hills of the country were visible—Malvern hanging like a small cloud on the horizon. For many days he lay in the June sun, listening to the stir of leaves, watching with curiosity the lives of small creatures he could not name. In deepest luxury he sat day by day on a fallen trunk across the stream, grateful after the blazing descent of a broken hill for the cool shade of trees meeting overhead, watching a fish lying under the bank or rising to snap at a fly. Or he would be buried in grass, softly topped by the light wind, diverted after long, empty moments by the appearance of a rabbit or a bird not suspecting him. Peter dreamed away whole days, utterly vacant of thought, recording things. He counted[Pg 146] the number of times a glossy black cow, munching beside him, masticated her food between each return of the cud. There was a horse which had brought his trunk to the house who always stood with his head thrust through a gap in the hedge. Peter watched the flies collect upon his eyelids, and waited lazily for the blink which regularly dispersed them in a tiny cloud. Peter, in reaction from the fruitless activity of his last months in London, rested and was pleased. It seemed as he lay upon the earth that the scent of the grass was life enough; that reality, humming in wings of the air, in the splashing of water, in noises of the cattle, was sufficient for his uninquiring day. He took an enormous pleasure in small material things—the spiriting of warm milk into the pail; the breath of an old dog as he stood, watchful and erect, in the cold morning; the slow, graceful sweeping of a scythe; the shining of the first star after sunset; the clipping of hot fingers into the brook; the odour of ham frizzling in the farmer\'s pan.

At night, with the curtains drawn, and by the light of an oil lamp whose smell was ever after associated in Peter\'s mind with these rustic days, he played with the books which Marbury had packed for him. Among them was Burton\'s Arabian Nights and Urquhart\'s Rabelais. Marbury had well chosen. Peter had never felt before the wonder of Rabelais. Here, alone with the beasts and with people whose lives were taken[Pg 147] up with their feeding and breeding, Peter smelt in Rabelais the fresh dirt and sweat of the earth. He squarely received between his shoulders the hearty slap of a laughter broad as mankind. Rabelais was the evening chorus of his day in the fields. The voices of the hearty morning, the slow noon, and the quiet evening sounded between the lines where Grangousier warmed his great bulk by the fire and Gargantua thrived to enormous manhood.

It was only after many days that Peter looked into Burton. He wondered why Marbury should have included a book he knew only as a series of pretty tales. Then he found that beside his Rabelais upon the shelf was the greatest song of the flesh yet uttered.

After his first night with Burton, Peter flung wide his window to the air. A cat slunk cautiously into the garden and away. The farmer and his wife came out for a moment to read the sky, and stood in the light of the door. The old man lifted his face, and was moulded clearly in silhouette—a face beaten hard with weather, but untroubled after seventy years of appetites healthily satisfied. He was sagacious as befitted his high species; he had eaten and drunk for sixty-five years, and had bred of his kind. All this he had inevitably done as a creature with his spade in the earth and his hand heavy upon the inferior beasts.

Mere flesh and blood was good, and it endured.[Pg 148] Peter\'s heart was pulsing now with a song older than an English farmer—a song of man who was tickled under an Eastern sun and laughed, who was pricked with absolute lust—who found his flesh not an obstacle between himself and heaven, but his heritage and expression.

Peter was not thinking. He idly looked and received a faint rain of impressions from the still night and from memories of a tale. A barrier of fresh earth mounted between him and his troubles of the year. He was content to rest and dream. He turned from the window, weary with air and sun, stretching his elbows in an agreeable yawn. He felt the clean flexion of the muscles of his arm. He stretched again, repeating a healthy pleasure, and yawned happily to bed.

Haymaking under a burning sun began on the following day, and Peter offered help to the farmer. The old man looked favourably at Peter\'s broad shoulders and friendly eyes. Then there were long back-breaking hours in the open field. Peter learned why there was leisure and grace in the movements of his companion, and tried to imitate, under pleasant chaff, the expert\'s artful economy of power.

Peter soon found in his new friend a surprising fund of wisdom painfully gathered. The farmer\'s knowledge was limited, bu............