“There is no spirit of God here,” he said, poking viciously at the coals in the stove. “The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank.” For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in his church. The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and unnatural. “The man,” thought Sam, “has no feeling for public address and is not treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the ideas he has expounded to me in his house.” He decided there was something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort. One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to him as he stood on the little porch before the house. “I wish you would go away,” she said, standing with her babe in her arms and looking at the porch floor. “You stir him up and make him dissatisfied.” Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness. There had been tears in the wife’s eyes. In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.