The Deliverance by Ellen Glasgow — Read

The next morning he awoke with stiffened limbs and confusion in his head, and for a time he lay idly looking at his little window-panes, beyond which the dawn hung like a curtain. Then, as a long finger of sunlight pointed through the glass, he rose with an effort and, dressing himself hastily, went downstairs to breakfast. Here he found that Zebbadee Blake, who had promised to help him cut his crop, had not yet appeared, owing probably to the excitement of Fletcher's runaway. The man's absence annoyed him at first; and then, as the day broke clear and cold, he succumbed to his ever present fear of frost and, taking his pruning-knife from the kitchen mantelpiece, went out alone to begin work on his ripest plants.

The sun had already tempered the morning chill in the air, and the slanting beams stretched over the tobacco, which, as the dew dried, showed a vivid green but faintly tinged with yellow -- a colour that even in the sparkling sunlight appeared always slightly shadowed. To attempt alone the cutting of his crop, small as it was, seemed, with his stiffened limbs, a particularly trying task, and for a moment he stood gazing wearily across the field. Presently, with a deliberate movement as if he were stooping to shoulder a fresh burden, he slit the first ripe stalk from its flaunting top to within a hand's-breadth of the ground; then, cutting it half through near the roots, he let it fall to one side, where it hung, slowly wilting, on the earth. Gradually, as he applied himself to the work, the old zest of healthful labour returned to him, and he passed buoyantly through the narrow aisle, leaving a devastated furrow on either side.