The poorest farmer sometimes halts in yard or field, hands in pockets, and tastes the great happiness of knowing that the sun's heat, the warm rain, the earth's unstinted alchemy--every mighty force of nature--is working as a humble slave for him ...

for him.
-- And then, the surnmertide; the glory of sunny noons, the heated quivering air that blurs the horizon and the outline of the forest, the flies swarming and circling in the sun's rays, and but three hundred paces from the house the rapids and the fall--white foam against dark water--the mere sight of it filling one with a delicious coolness.

In its due time the harvest; the grain that gives life heaped into the barns; then autumn and soon the returning winter ...

But here was the marvel of it, that the winter seemed no longer abhorrent or terrifying; it brought in its train the sweet intimacies of a house shut fast, and beyond the door, with the sameness and the soundlessness of deep-drifted snow, peace, a great peace.

.
In the cities were the strange and wonderful things whereof Lorenzo Surprenant had told, with others that she pictured to herself confusedly: wide streets suffused with light, gorgeous shops, an easy fife of little toil with a round of small pleasures and distractions.