I must have gone to
the length of scooping up honey with my knife blade."
It was magically, mystically beautiful over all this squalor and toil
and bitterness, from five till seven-a moving hour. Again the
falling sun streamed in broad banners across the valleys; again the
blue mist lay far down the coulee over the river; the cattle called
from the hills in the moistening, sonorous air; the bells came in a
pleasant tangle of sound; the air pulsed with the deepening chorus
of katydids and other nocturnal singers.
Sweet and deep as the very springs of his life was all this to the
soul of the elder brother; but in the midst of it, the younger man, in
ill-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out
to milk the. cows-on whose legs the flies and mosquitoes
swarmed, bloated with blood-to sit by the hot side of the cow and
be lashed with her tall as she tried frantically to keep the savage
insects from eating her raw.
"The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the
hammock, looking on," Howard soliloquized as he watched the old
man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one of the young
heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with the flies and
was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive.
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