"The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib. 
            The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall. 
            These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights. 
            “The shapes that are gone--are here,” said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth, one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa."