I think I see old Eppie now, filling her sack with what the wind blew her; not with the grain: Eppie did not covet that; she only wanted her bed filled with fresh springy chaff, on which she would sleep as sound as her rheumatism would let her, and as warm and dry and comfortable as any duchess in the land that happened to have the rheumatism too.

For comfort is inside more than outside; and eider down, delicious as it is, has less to do with it than some people fancy.

How I wish all the poor people in the great cities could have good chaff beds to lie upon! Let me see: what more machines are there now?
More than I can tell.

I saw one going in the fields the other day, at the use of which I could only guess.
Strange, wild-looking, mad-like machines, as the Scotch would call them, are growling and snapping, and clinking and clattering over our fields, so that it seems to an old boy as if all the sweet poetic twilight of things were vanishing from the country; but he reminds himself that God is not going to sleep, for, as one of the greatest poets that ever lived says, _he slumbereth not nor sleepeth_; and the children of the earth are his, and he will see that their imaginations and feelings have food enough and to spare.

It is his business this--not ours.