Reminders of the old life to which he was returning came to him thick and fast when the train got fairly out of the city. In a field he saw a man stripping the leaves from standing corn-stalks, and although the view was what photographers term “instantaneous,” it was long enough to show the shabby attire, brown face, shocking bad hat, clumsy boots, and general air of resignation that marked all farmers in the vicinity of Haynton. Two or three miles farther along he saw a half-grown boy picking up stones in a field of thin soil and adding them to piles which were painfully significant of much similar work in past days. Down in a marshy pasture beside the railway-embankment two men were digging a drainage-ditch: they were too far apart to be company for each other, and too muddy to be attractive to themselves. Phil at once recalled much work of like nature he had done, and more that still depended upon his muscle to make the entire acreage of Hayn farm available for cultivation. Estimating according to past experience and newly-acquired knowledge, he found that the number of days of work required, if paid for at the lowest rate of common laborers in New York, would amount to twice as much as the value of the land when improved. It was easy to see why farmers never got rich. Still, the farm was his natural sphere; he had been born to it. Heaven, in arranging his life-career, knew in advance what he was fit for, and his own difference of opinion would probably be explained away in time by the logic of events which he could not foresee. In a dusty road near a little station at which the train stopped he saw two farmers’ wagons meet, stop, and their owners engage in conversation. Thus would he, the observer, soon be obtaining whatever news he acquired; instead of every morning opening a newspaper recording the previous day’s doings throughout the civilized world, he would be restricted to stories of how Joddles’s horse, who had cast himself, was getting along with his scraped hip-joint, and when Bragfew thought he might be likely to kill a beef if he could find somebody to take a forequarter which hadn’t been spoken for yet, the chances of Nemy Perkins being “churched” for calling Deacon Thewser a sneaking old sheep-thief, and much more information equally entertaining and instructive. Well, why not? What better news would he himself be likely to offer? He was not going to fall into the sin, warning of which had been given by one of the apostles, of esteeming himself more highly than his neighbors: some people in the vicinity of Haynton did not seem much better than fools, but probably none of them had ever been so idiotic as to fall in love with women far above them in social station and consequently far beyond their reach.