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The Mettle of the Pasture

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shocks--guiltless harvest; then toward a pasture on the horizon. He could see his cattle winding slowly along the edge of a russet woodland on which the slanting sunlight fell. Against the blue sky in the silvery air a few crows were flying: all went in the same direction but each went without companions. He watched their wings curiously with lonely, following eyes. Whither home passed they? And by whose summons? And with what guidance? A deep yearning stirred him, and he summoned his wife and the nurse with his infant son. He greeted her; then raising himself on one elbow and leaning over the edge of the bed, he looked a long time at the boy slumbering on the nurse's lap. The lesson of his brief span of years gathered into his gaze. "Life of my life," he said, with that lesson on his lips, "sign of my love, of what was best in me, this is my prayer for you: may you find one to love you such as your father found; when you come to ask her to unite her life with yours, may you be prepared to tell her the truth about yourself, and have nothing to tell that would break her heart and break the hearts of others. May it be said of you that you are a better man than your father." He had the child lifted and he kissed his forehead and his eyes. "By the purity of your own life guard the purity of your sons for the long honor of our manhood." Then he made a sign that the nurse should withdraw. When she had withdrawn, he put his face down on the edge of the pillow where his wife knelt, her face hidden. His hair fell over and mingled with her hair. He passed his arm around her neck and held her close. "All your troubles came to you because you were true to the highest. You asked only the highest from me, and the highest was more than I could give. But be kind to my memory. Try to forget what is best forgotten, but remember what is worth remembering. Judge me for what I was; but judge me also for what I wished to be. Teach my son to honor my name; and when he is old enough to understand, tell him the truth about his father. Tell him what it was that saddened our lives. As he looks into his mother's face, it will steady him." He put both arms around her neck. "I am tired of it all," he said. "I want rest. Love has been more cruel to me than death." A few days later, an afternoon of the same autumnal stillness, they bore him across his threshold with that gentleness which so often comes too late--slowly through his many-colored woods, some leaves drifting down upon the sable plumes and lodging in them---along the turnpike lined with dusty thistles--through the watching town, a long procession, to the place of the unreturning. They laid him along with his fathers.

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