The field was soft and shiny. There was pretty cobwebs. Everything looked new and glossy. "Great guns!" I says. "Ain't it nice out here?" "That's exactly what I've been thinking," says he. We went along still for a little ways. It come to me that maybe, if I could only say some of the things that moved around on the outside of my head, he might like them. But I couldn't get them together enough. "It makes you want to think nice thoughts," I says, by and by. "Doesn't it?" he says, with his quick, straight look. "And when it does, then you do." "I don't know enough," I says. "I wisht I did." I'll never, never forget when we come to the top of the little hill. He stood there with nothing but the sky, blue as fury, behind him. "Now look," he says. "There's New York, over there." "You can't see New York from here!" I says. "Not with no specs that was ever invented." He went right on. "Down there," he says, "are St. Louis and Cincinnati and New Orleans. Across there is Chicago. And away on there are two days of desert--two days, by express train!--and then mountains and a green coast, and San Francisco and the Pacific. And then all the things we talked about this morning: Japan and India and the Alps and London and Rome and the Nile." I wondered what on earth he was driving at. "Which do you want to do," says he, "go there, and try to find these places? You won't find them, you know. But at least, you'll know they're in the world. Or live down there in a little farm-house like that one and slave for Luke?" "But I can't even try to find them places," I says. "How could I?" "Maybe not," he says. "Maybe not. I don't say you could. All I mean is this, Why not think of your life as if you have really been born, and not as if you were waiting to be born?" "Oh," I says, "don't you s'pose I've thought of that? But I can't get away." "Yes, you can," he says, looking at me, earnest. "Yes, you can. If you just say the word." I was as tall as he was, and I looked right at him, with all the strength I had. "Do you think," I says, "that because I'm from the country I ain't on to all such talk as that? Do you think I don't know what them kind of hold-outs means? We ain't such fools as you think we are, not since Hattie Duffy thought she was going to Paris, and ended in the bottom of a pond. They's only one way any of us ever gets to see any of them things, and don't you think we're fooled unless we want to be. No, sir. We ain't that fresh." He scared me the way he whirled round at me. "You miserable little creature!" he said. "What are you talking about?" "Well," I says, "don't you ever think I--" Then he done a funny thing. He drew a deep breath, and took his hat off and looked up at the sky and off over the fields. "After all," he said, "thank God this is the way you are beginning to take it! When a country girl can protect herself like that, it is growing safe for her to be born. Listen to me, child," he says.