It was especially grateful to Will, for he had spent nearly all his years of absence among the rocks, treeless swells, and bleak cliffs of the Southwest. The crickets rising before his dusty feet appeared to him something sweet and suggestive, and the cattle feeding in the clover moved him to deep thought--they were so peaceful and slow motioned. As he reached a little popple tree by the roadside, he stopped, removed his broad-brimmed hat, put his elbows on the fence, and looked hungrily upon the scene. The sky was deeply blue, with only here and there a huge, heavy, slow-moving, massive, sharply outlined cloud sailing like a berg of ice in a shoreless sea of azure. In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and the sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a kingbird clattered overhead. He noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that the softened sound of the far-off reaper was at times exactly like the hum of a bluebottle fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears. A slender and very handsome young man was shocking grain near the fence, working so desperately he did not see Will until greeted by him. He looked up, replied to the greeting, but kept on until he had finished his last stook; then he came to the shade of the tree and took off his hat. "Nice day to sit under a tree and fish." Will smiled. "I ought to know you, I suppose; I used to live here years ago." "Guess not; we came in three years ago." The young man was quick-spoken and pleasant to look at. Will felt freer with him. "Are the Kinneys still living over there?" He nodded at a group of large buildings. "Tom lives there. Old man lives with Ed. Tom ousted the old man some way, nobody seems to know how, and so he lives with Ed." Will wanted to ask after Agnes, but hardly felt able. "I s'pose John Hannan is on his old farm?" "Yes. Got a good crop this year." Will looked again at the fields of rustling wheat over which the clouds rippled, and said with an air of conviction: "This lays over Arizony, dead sure." "You're from Arizony, then?" "Yes--a good ways from it," Will replied, in a way that stopped further question. "Good luck!" he added, as he walked on down the road toward the creek, musing. "And the spring--I wonder if that's there yet. I'd like a drink." The sun seemed hotter than at noon, and he walked slowly. At the bridge that spanned the meadow brook, just where it widened over a sandy ford, he paused again. He hung over the rail and looked at the minnows swimming there. "I wonder if they're the same identical chaps that used to boil and glitter there when I was a boy--looks so. Men change from one generation to another, but the fish remain the same. The same eternal procession of types. I suppose Darwin 'ud say their environment remains the same."