All creatures, from the
tiniest insect upward, were in reality busy under that curtain of
white-heat haze. It looked so still, so quiet, from afar; entering it and
passing among the fields, all that lived was found busy at its long day's
work. Roger did not interest himself in these things, in the wasps that
left the gate as he approached--they were making _papier-mache_ from the
wood of the top bar,--in the bright poppies brushing against his drab
unpolished boots, in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they
were nothing to him.
Why should they be? His life was work without skill or thought, the work
of the horse, of the crane that lifts stones and timber. His food was
rough, his drink rougher, his lodging dry planks. His books were--none;
his picture-gallery a coloured print at the alehouse--a dog, dead, by a
barrel, "Trust is dead! Bad Pay killed him." Of thought he thought
nothing; of hope his idea was a shilling a week more wages; of any future
for himself of comfort such as even a good cottage can give--of any
future whatever--he had no more conception than the horse in the shafts
of the waggon. A human animal simply in all this, yet if you reckoned
upon him as simply an animal--as has been done these centuries--you would
now be mistaken.
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