Needlessly soon he had his axe-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me To have the best he had, or had to spare— Not for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point me out at length To insure their not being wasted on me. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay For the hard work. He chafed its long white body From end to end with his rough hand shut round it. He tried it at the eye-hole in the axe-head. “Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.” Baptiste knew how to make a short job long For love of it, and yet not waste time either. Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge? Baptiste on his defence about the children He kept from school, or did his best to keep— Whatever school and children and our doubts Of laid-on education had to do With the curves of his axe-helves and his having Used these unscrupulously to bring me To see for once the inside of his house. Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one To leave it to, whether the right to hold Such doubts of education should depend Upon the education of those who held them? But now he brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the axe there on its horse’s hoof, Erect, but not without its waves, as when The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,— Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little—a French touch in that. Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased; “See how she’s cock her head!” THE GRINDSTONE Having a wheel and four legs of its own Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone To get it anywhere that I can see. These hands have helped it go, and even race; Not all the motion, though, they ever lent, Not all the miles it may have thought it went, Have got it one step from the starting place. It stands beside the same old apple tree. The shadow of the apple tree is thin Upon it now, its feet are fast in snow. All other farm machinery’s gone in, And some of it on no more legs and wheel Than the grindstone can boast to stand or go. (I’m thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.) For months it hasn’t known the taste of steel, Washed down with rusty water in a tin. But standing outdoors hungry, in the cold, Except in towns at night, is not a sin. And, anyway, its standing in the yard Under a ruinous live apple tree Has nothing any more to do with me, Except that I remember how of old One summer day, all day I drove it hard, And someone mounted on it rode it hard, And he and I between us ground a blade.