In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a moral. For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering frenzy of belief in what I was doing. * * * * * The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest. There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard he was in need of hands for the season. I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's. Bonton looked me over. "You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard." "I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't mind walking back to town." Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of Osage orange trees. Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang. We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small, oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ... much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities. "Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?" "Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles." "We'd best wait a little longer, then." * * * * * Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it, tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high. I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite. "I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically, peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again.... "I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls." "Just give me time till I learn the hang of it." I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.