The Good Earth

The wind was blowing heavily, laden with the breath of winter, heralding to nature an abundant bounty.

The man stood turning his face toward the far horizon, as though he wished to pierce with his gaze into the unknown reaches of the sky and divine what lay behind the gray clouds. Then he turned his eyes from the horizon and cast his gaze upon the thirsting earth, whose longing for the hoe... and the rain had grown so long!

The earth appeared before him, surrendering to the strong blows of his hoe, as he entrusted to it the grain and the seed, and it offered him bounty... and gold.

He pictured it in spring, rippling in its resplendent green garment, resting under the kisses of the shade, bathing in a flood of sunlight.

Then, when summer came, and autumn followed it, borne on the wings of the north wind, and the shoulders of the crops grew heavy with ripened grain, he would swing his sickle lightly and fill his threshing floors with sheaves and his hut with good things.

The man drew a deep breath of contentment, and his features lit up in a happy smile. Then suddenly he started from his imaginings and his dreams; reality confronted him with all its bitterness and cruelty, and he remembered that he had sold the land a week before.

Yes, he had sold it... sold it to people who made quick riches attractive to him, tempted him with ringing gold, and deluded him into believing that wealth lay in ease...!!

Yes, he had sold the land! The land in which was his bread, from whose clay was his shelter, and in whose soil he would be laid to rest and die in stillness and peace.

This land his fathers had inherited from his forefathers, who in their turn bequeathed it to him, and he had meant to hand it on to his sons... But.

But here are these intruders, trampling the earth with heavy plowing machines and turning its depths inside out.

He wished he could go to them, fling the money in their faces and say: Take it... take your papers and give me back my land, for the price you paid is not worth a grain of its dust.

But alas... alas!

And from the man's eye a tear escaped...

a hot tear, swallowed up by the deep furrows of his face.

And that tear of his was far dearer and more precious than the gold that had been paid to him as the price of the good earth.