The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character. In conjunction with your team of horses, it becomes a glorious galleon, which you steer proudly over the rolling fields like some mariner of old. It is no longer an ugly, awkward, inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch … Not that the poesy of ploughing is continuous. The length of the lines is determined by the head-lands; it is broken into verses by each strike-out, and, if you wish to continue the simile, into different poems by the different fields. Such a nuisance these breaks are! Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever without these petty hindrances ? But, this being impossible, one is forced to turn, to let the plough grate clumsily along the head-land, then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more.

'Tis true I am no physician, but I would suggest in all sincerity that three months’ steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous break-down. For ploughing is a mental tonic of great power. The ploughman is master of the situation. Nothing can stop him. Little by little he changes the surface of the earth. The plough may be slow, but it is so very sure. As the strip of black on the east side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider and wider until it neared the west boundary, I was forced to marvel at the relentless power of the plough.