II
"Follow it far enough and it may pass the bend in the river where
the water laughs eternally over its shallows."
A CORNFIELD in July is a hot place. The soil is hot and dry; the
wind comes across the lazily murmuring leaves laden with a warm
sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung
banners of the corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood of
dazzing light and heat upon the field over which the cool shadows
run, only to make the heat seem the more intense.
Julia Peterson, faint with fatigue, was tolling back and forth
between the corn rows, holding the handles of the double-shovel
corn plow while her little brother Otto rode the steaming horse.
Her heart was full of bitterness, and her face flushed with heat, and
her muscles aching with fatigue. The heat grew terrible. The corn
came to her shoulders, and not a breath seemed to reach her, while
the sun, nearing the noon mark, lay pitilessly upon her shoulders,
protected only by a calico dress. The dust rose under her feet, and
as she was wet with perspiration it soiled her till, with a woman's
instinctive cleanliness, she shuddered. Her head throbbed
dangerously. what matter to her that the king bird pitched jovially
from the maples to catch a wandering bluebottle fly, that the robin
was feeding its young, that the bobolink was singing? All these
things, if she saw them, only threw her bondage to labor into
greater relief.
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