A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his wife was with us, working, too. When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence. He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His whole life and pleasure was senseless work. And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas jail. But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book." I never met the old man's equal for parsimony. "The last man--the man who worked for me before you came--he was a Pole, who could hardly speak English. He left because he didn't like the food ... yes, that was what he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so bad ... don't I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every other night?" I assented to what the old man said. He had been the milkman to the Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the great men. And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them, than to draw wages for my work. But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great fools as the outside world esteemed them great men. "They talked a lot about work and a man's being independent, earning his living with his own hands, from the soil, but,--did they follow their teachings?... that's the test.... "And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless, across their neighbours' crops." And that was the only information I could get of these famous men from their milkman. * * * * * Sowerby kept pigs under the barn.... For economy's sake the cows' dung was shovelled down to them. And over them the outhouse was also built, so that our human efforts might not be wasted.... * * * * * One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight. On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the plain disgust of the horses and cows.