I know of a college president who used to bind (he may still) a cold compress about his head at times, and, lying prone upon the floor, have two readers, one for each ear, read simultaneously to him different theses, so great was the work he had to do, so fierce his fight for time--time to lecture to women’s clubs and to write his epoch-making books. Oh, the multitude of epoch-making books! But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live among a people who are Commuters, and I have stood with them on the banks of the Ohio, according to the suggestion of one of our wisest philosophers (Josh Billings, I think), and, in order to see how well the world could get on without me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow current, pulled it out, and looked for the hole. The placid stream flowed on. So now, when the day’s work is done, I turn homeward here to Mullein Hill, and these early autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the stable, while four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow--“Bucksy” stories of the noble red-man; stories of Arthur and the Table Round, of Guyon and Britomart, and the heroes of old; and marvelous stories of that greatest hero of them all--their father, far away yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting things to do, and such fun doing them! Now the world is so “full of a number of things”--things to do still, but things, instead of hands, and things instead of selves, so many things to do them with--even a _thing_ to milk with, now! But I will continue to use my hands. No, I shall probably never become a great milk-contractor. I shall probably remain only a Commuter to the end. But if I never become anything great,--the Father of my Country, or the Father of Poetry, or the Father of Chemistry, or the Father of the Flying Machine,--why, I am at least the father of these four shining faces in the lantern light; and I have, besides them, handed down from the past, a few more of life’s old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle reader, with their simple old-fashioned blessings. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS U · S · A End of Project Gutenberg's The Face of the Fields, by Dallas Lore Sharp