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158
Adventures in Contentment
·
David Grayson
33
I
suppose
I
showed
my
feeling
in
my
voice.
As
I
glanced
up
from
time
to
time
I
saw
the
agent's
face
change,
and
his
look
deepen
and
the
lips,
usually
so
energetically
tense,
loosen
with
emotion.
Surely
no
poem
in
all
the
language
conveys
so
perfectly
the
simple
love
of
the
home,
the
quiet
joys,
hopes,
pathos
of
those
who
live
close
to
the
soil.
When
I
had
finished--I
stopped
with
the
stanza
beginning:
"Then
homeward
all
take
off
their
sev'ral
way";
the
agent
turned
away
his
head
trying
to
brave
out
his
emotion.
Most
of
us,
Anglo-Saxons,
tremble
before
a
tear
when
we
might
fearlessly
beard
a
tiger.
I
moved
up
nearer
to
the
agent
and
put
my
hand
on
his
knee;
then
I
read
two
or
three
of
the
other
things
I
found
in
his
wonderful
book.
And
once
I
had
him
laughing
and
once
again
I
had
the
tears
in
his
eyes.
Oh,
a
simple
young
man,
a
little
crusty
without,
but
soft
inside--like
the
rest
of
us.
Well,
it
was
amazing
once
we
began
talking
not
of
books
but
of
life,
how
really
eloquent
and
human
he
became.
From
being
a
distant
and
uncomfortable
person,
he
became
at
once
like
a
near
neighbour
and
friend.
It
was
strange
to
me--as
I
have
thought
since--how
he
conveyed
to
us
in
few
words
the
essential
emotional
note
of
his
life.
It
was
no
violin
tone,
beautifully
complex
with
harmonics,
but
the
clear
simple
voice
of
the
flute.
It
spoke
of
his
wife
and
his
baby
girl
and
his
home.
The
very
incongruity
of
detail--he
told
us
how
he
grew
onions
in
his
back
yard--added
somehow
to
the
homely
glamour
of
the
vision
which
he
gave
us.
The
number
of
his
house,
the
fact
that
he
had
a
new
cottage
organ,
and
that
the
baby
ran
away
and
lost
herself
in
Seventeenth
Street--were
all,
curiously,
fabrics
of
his
emotion.
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