The farm road lying through the pasture did not come near the cabin but ran in a curve up from the gate at the turnpike, past the pond, and made off toward the upper fields. Men sometimes went along this road on horseback, neighbours from the small farms toward the river. Ellen chopped the wood at the woodpile in the yard and she carried water from an old well in the rear of the pasture. She was afraid to pass beyond the ways allotted to her by her labours, and so the region beyond the pond stood off as a picture, unexplored. The cow would turn away from the other cows and linger down toward the osage shrubs beside the pond, humble, not sure she was wanted, ready to come when Ellen made a little detour to drive her in. Ellen looked forward to the time when the turkeys would be hatched at the barnyard, for she was to have charge of them during the day and see that they came safely home at evening. These duties would take her nearer the barns and the people working there. She might get to know Ben the negro, and John Bradshaw the hand who looked after the mules and horses; she might get to know Josie the yellow girl, even Mr Al Wakefield, or even Miss Tod, his wife. Wonder coloured every act with a haunting sense of its past or its relation to something. In the cabin she would look at the doorways, the knobs, and the latches, at the closet under the stair. She felt a great rush of well-being as she mounted the stairs, a sense of pageantry, and she tried different methods of descent, walking demurely, gliding down stiffly, or tripping down with dancing steps.

When Henry had burned his plant bed he ploughed and hoed the ashes into the soil and made a frame of logs about the whole, a light frame to hold the canvas that would be stretched over the bed when the seeds were sown. There were more stones to gather after the ploughing and these Ellen piled outside the bed. The rocks were dark with mould and moss, for this was a virgin hill. It was a mild March day, cool and clear, with winds worrying the hillside brush and leaping off across the farms in a great rush or beating gently now and then at Ellen’s garments. Henry nailed at the frame while she worked with the stones.

‘No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,’ Henry said.

‘The time of man’, as a saying, fell over and over in Ellen’s mind. The strange men that lived here before our men, a strange race doing things in strange ways, and other men before them, and before again. Strange feet walking on a hillside for some purpose she could never think. Wondering and wondering she laid stones on her altar.

‘Pappy, where do rocks come from?’