Jasper worked all day in the rich bottom fields where the crops teemed under the warm and abundant summer. From time to time his song would arise from the rich ploughing or harvesting. The richness of Goddard’s yields, his prancing blooded horses and quick trainers, his elegant barns and his training track, all made a show which captivated his men until they took all delight in the pageant, forgetting themselves. Ellen looked with hate upon the rich meadow that had taken Jasper’s zeal until his pride was in telling over and over the abundance of its cuttings. Another child was born during the summer and this they named Joe in honour of Mr Phillips.

Hen and Nannie wore their clothes to rags but Ellen kept them to the hillside and visitors seldom came there. Her garden burnt in the sun for the shallow soil quickly gave up its moisture, and Jasper laughed at her tomato vines and her withering beans. ‘We got to wait here a spell,’ he said, ‘whe’r we want to or not.’ Or he would say, ‘Afterwhile…’ Goddard was slow to pay his hands, easy and light with their wages, gone from the farm on pay day as often as not and had no definite times for settlements. When Jasper came from work he would bring the meat to cook, fetched from Goddard’s smokehouse, or he would bring the flour or the meal or the sugar from the store, bought in small packages, scarcely more than a day’s need supplied at a time. Sometimes Ellen had a few eggs to trade, so few that she would remember Bell as she walked along the highway and feel that Bell’s stony gaze had come to her eyes.

One Sunday Jasper borrowed a wagon from one of the barns and took Ellen and the children riding over the field roads, even into neighbouring land, up and down well-made ways that lay among fertile prospects, the harness streaming and jingling, beating lightly on the backs of the horses. Jasper pointed out the fields, taking a great pleasure and a pride in his labour, urging Ellen to look, showing Hen this and that. In the end they stopped at the stables to see the great show stallion which only the trainer was let ride. They looked at his sleek brown flesh that so throbbed with life that every morsel of it seemed a separate living thing. A stable man was leading him before the door, letting him drink at the smooth concrete watering trough where a jet of water fell, cool and leisured. Jasper stood before the great beast with pride and joy in his eyes, his feet wide apart, talking familiarly with the groom, and Ellen hated the neat boots on the horse’s ankles and she hated Jasper’s deep concern with the groom over the set of the horse’s left fore shoe. Riding homeward they stopped at the creek where Hen caught a brightly-mottled red water animal, a brook salamander, a creature for which they had no name, but which filled Ellen and Hen with amazement and delight. Hen found a broken pail in the brook sand and, filling this with water, he made the creature a nest of fine moss at the bottom, and all the way homeward they watched the animal glide about in its small basin and they shouted and sang in their delight, or Ellen and Jasper sang, turn and turn about, each trying to remember a song the other had not heard.