It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the field’s end. It embraces the new food and the new hunger. It is in part a man, a farmer, walking across his pasture in mid-summer singing a song he himself is making as he goes kicking his work shoes through the grass, singing, “Loo loo lo lo hum bang fi oo,” singing “Old Whosoever Will is walken on the top of the meadow,” a cattle farmer, a breeder of Shorthorns, ten years hence or now, singing a mediæval altarpiece over the heads of his cows and tramping through a field of a here unnamed community of flowers out of which the great bee eats. It is a farmer, the same, Caleb Burns, a farmer of fine cattle, a cattle husbandman, walking among his barns or over his pastures making the beginnings of songs or butchering a young beef for food: he would, with his men to help, stab the young beast at the throat and hang it to bleed, one of his men catching the blood in a bucket, a bucket of blood running out of a young beef, warm stuff, sickening to the smell, stuff that nice people fear. Caleb Burns, son of George Burns and Rose Hamilton, an experienced husbandman knowing foolishness and loss, or a young man beginning his way, Caleb Burns singing a song. * * * * * Of the curbs and the streets, the lamp-posts and the street crossings, the drama of the court day, all the people kept a sense that these had been there a very long time, that these were the eternal marks of the earth and the ways by which man recognized himself in life. The town was but a little over a hundred years old, and back of that lay the wilderness; but few of the people knew how recently the town had begun. “Out of Virginia,” “Away back long ago,” were sayings in their vague accounts of themselves. The marks they had put upon the wilderness were older than any of the people could tell or the race remember and had been brought whole from some other life. The roads ran out from the town toward other towns, roads known now as hard streamers of yellow earth and broken stones, inviting going, winding among the rolling farms and lost in remote regions where unfamiliar hills came down toward alien fences and gathered here and there a curious tree or made off toward a distant unmeasured horizon. In the farms Jersey cattle or Shorthorns grazed, the last the red of the old Patton stock, brought from Virginia. The farmers came to town and thus brought the roads back to the streets and the lanes, came driving wagons laden with tobacco or hay or wheat or corn, and the cattle-men brought steers along the roads or the traders drove in the sheep, the spring lambs crying all June through the streets as they were flocked from day to day at the commons around the shipping pens.