All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow
he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until
the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse
and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.
Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and
then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the
roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence
corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting
away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.
Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields
the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting,
delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color.
As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand
shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.
In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not
yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing
lights--beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer
night--had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the
terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of
rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in
prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities.
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