CHAPTER XXV
Many persons, themselves city-bred and city-reared, have fled to
the soil and succeeded in winning great happiness. In such cases
they have succeeded only by going through a process of savage
disillusionment. But with Dede and Daylight it was different.
They had both been born on the soil, and they knew its naked
simplicities and rawer ways. They were like two persons, after
far wandering, who had merely come home again. There was less of
the unexpected in their dealings with nature, while theirs was
all the delight of reminiscence. What might appear sordid and
squalid to the fastidiously reared, was to them eminently
wholesome and natural. The commerce of nature was to them no
unknown and untried trade. They made fewer mistakes. They
already knew, and it was a joy to remember what they had
forgotten.
And another thing they learned was that it was easier for one who
has gorged at the flesh-pots to content himself with the
meagerness of a crust, than for one who has known only the crust.
Not that their life was meagre. It was that they found keener
delights and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight,
who had played the game in its biggest and most fantastic
aspects, found that here, on the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it
was still the same old game.
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