Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.
The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.
It was hardly dawn when he woke me....
A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged
wife had prepared. And we were out in the fields, at work. And soon his
wife was with us, working, too.
When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I
could believe him. He might have added a few more years, with credence.
He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it
fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded. It was
work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him. His
whole life and pleasure was senseless work.
And yet he was not a bookless man. He possessed many books, mostly the
old religious classics. Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, Baxter's _Saint's
Rest_, Blair, _On the Grave_ ... Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy
Dying_, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance--Keats had
read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New
England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of
doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ... I thought back
to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas
jail.
But now old Sowerby read nothing. "I have no time left for a book.
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