But how far run the ways of nature from the devious ways of men! The ways of Mullein Hill from the ways of a military camp! The Great War came and passed and left the earth a vast human grave. But through it all seedtime and harvest came to Mullein Hill, leaving only more and more abundant life. The Great War is an illustration on the grandest scale of what man, departing from the simple ways of nature, will do to man. War is the logic of our present way of living. I am not concerned with war in this book, but with the sources of life and literature. I have a cure for war, however, here on Mullein Hill; and this cure is the very elixir of life and literature. War could have destroyed, but it did not change, my going or coming here in the hills. My garden went on as it had for years gone on. There was a little more of it, for there was more need in the village; there was a little larger yield of its reasonableness and joy and beans. But I did not plough up my front lawn for potatoes. Years before I had provided myself with a back yard, and got it into tilth for potatoes, keeping the front lawn green for the cow. Though she is only a grade Jersey, the cow is a pretty creature, and gives a rural, ruminant touch to our approach, along with the lilacs and the hens. Hitched here on the front lawn the cow suggests economy, too. She is more than a wagon hitched to a star. She is a mowing-machine, and a rake and tedder, and a churn. The gods with her do my mowing, gather up and cure my hay, and turn it into cream. Every cow gives some skim milk--which we need for the chickens, for cooking, and cottage cheese. Life is not all cream. If I speak of gods doing my chores, I will say they do not milk for me in the mornings, and that it is one of the boys who milks at night. A cow clipping your lawn is poetry and cream too, but caring for the creature is often skim milk and prose. Milking ought to be done regularly. Get a cow and you find her cud a kind of pendulum to all creation, the time to milk being synchronized twice daily to the stars. I did not plant war-potatoes on my front lawn, partly because they would not grow there, and partly because, in times of peace, I had prepared for war-potatoes; and partly because I think a front lawn looks better in cows than in potatoes. If thou shouldst “So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan ... Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon,” --should we not all live so that, when war comes, we need not plough up the beds for potatoes where the portulaca and poppy ought to blow?