One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the
whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day
he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road
through the wide lands below. The horseman shone as he rode, and wore
white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red
cross. ``One of them knights,'' John Plowman said to himself or his
horse, ``going to them crusades.'' And he went on with his plowing all
that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and
told his son.
For there is in England, and there always was, mixed with the needful
things that feed or shelter the race, the wanderer-feeling for
romantic causes that runs deep and strange through the other thoughts,
as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea. Sometimes generations of John
Plowman's family would go by and no high romantic cause would come to
sate that feeling. They would work on just the same though a little
sombrely, as though some good thing had been grudged them. And then
the Crusades had come, and John Plowman had seen the Red Cross knight
go by, riding towards the sea in the morning, and Jon Plowman was
satisfied.
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