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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Being a Boy, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Being a Boy
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2016 [EBook #3127]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEING A BOY ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BEING A BOY
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+BEING A BOY
+
+
+
+
+I. BEING A BOY
+
+
+One of the best things in the world to be is a boy; it requires
+no experience, though it needs some practice to be a good one. The
+disadvantage of the position is that it does not last long enough; it is
+soon over; just as you get used to being a boy, you have to be something
+else, with a good deal more work to do and not half so much fun. And
+yet every boy is anxious to be a man, and is very uneasy with the
+restrictions that are put upon him as a boy. Good fun as it is to yoke
+up the calves and play work, there is not a boy on a farm but would
+rather drive a yoke of oxen at real work. What a glorious feeling it
+is, indeed, when a boy is for the first time given the long whip and
+permitted to drive the oxen, walking by their side, swinging the long
+lash, and shouting “Gee, Buck!” “Haw, Golden!” “Whoa, Bright!” and all
+the rest of that remarkable language, until he is red in the face, and
+all the neighbors for half a mile are aware that something unusual is
+going on. If I were a boy, I am not sure but I would rather drive the
+oxen than have a birthday. The proudest day of my life was one day when
+I rode on the neap of the cart, and drove the oxen, all alone, with a
+load of apples to the cider-mill. I was so little that it was a wonder
+that I did n't fall off, and get under the broad wheels. Nothing could
+make a boy, who cared anything for his appearance, feel flatter than to
+be run over by the broad tire of a cart-wheel. But I never heard of one
+who was, and I don't believe one ever will be. As I said, it was a great
+day for me, but I don't remember that the oxen cared much about it. They
+sagged along in their great clumsy way, switching their tails in my face
+occasionally, and now and then giving a lurch to this or that side of
+the road, attracted by a choice tuft of grass. And then I “came the
+Julius Caesar” over them, if you will allow me to use such a slang
+expression, a liberty I never should permit you. I don't know that
+Julius Caesar ever drove cattle, though he must often have seen the
+peasants from the Campagna “haw” and “gee” them round the Forum (of
+course in Latin, a language that those cattle understood as well as ours
+do English); but what I mean is, that I stood up and “hollered” with all
+my might, as everybody does with oxen, as if they were born deaf, and
+whacked them with the long lash over the head, just as the big folks did
+when they drove. I think now that it was a cowardly thing to crack the
+patient old fellows over the face and eyes, and make them wink in their
+meek manner. If I am ever a boy again on a farm, I shall speak gently
+to the oxen, and not go screaming round the farm like a crazy man; and I
+shall not hit them a cruel cut with the lash every few minutes, because
+it looks big to do so and I cannot think of anything else to do. I never
+liked lickings myself, and I don't know why an ox should like them,
+especially as he cannot reason about the moral improvement he is to get
+out of them.
+
+Speaking of Latin reminds me that I once taught my cows Latin. I don't
+mean that I taught them to read it, for it is very difficult to teach
+a cow to read Latin or any of the dead languages,--a cow cares more
+for her cud than she does for all the classics put together. But if you
+begin early, you can teach a cow, or a calf (if you can teach a calf
+anything, which I doubt), Latin as well as English. There were ten cows,
+which I had to escort to and from pasture night and morning. To these
+cows I gave the names of the Roman numerals, beginning with Unus and
+Duo, and going up to Decem. Decem was, of course, the biggest cow of the
+party, or at least she was the ruler of the others, and had the place of
+honor in the stable and everywhere else. I admire cows, and especially
+the exactness with which they define their social position. In this
+case, Decem could “lick” Novem, and Novem could “lick” Octo, and so on
+down to Unus, who could n't lick anybody, except her own calf. I suppose
+I ought to have called the weakest cow Una instead of Unus, considering
+her sex; but I did n't care much to teach the cows the declensions of
+adjectives, in which I was not very well up myself; and, besides,
+it would be of little use to a cow. People who devote themselves too
+severely to study of the classics are apt to become dried up; and you
+should never do anything to dry up a cow. Well, these ten cows knew
+their names after a while, at least they appeared to, and would take
+their places as I called them. At least, if Octo attempted to get before
+Novem in going through the bars (I have heard people speak of a “pair
+of bars” when there were six or eight of them), or into the stable,
+the matter of precedence was settled then and there, and, once settled,
+there was no dispute about it afterwards. Novem either put her horns
+into Octo's ribs, and Octo shambled to one side, or else the two locked
+horns and tried the game of push and gore until one gave up. Nothing
+is stricter than the etiquette of a party of cows. There is nothing
+in royal courts equal to it; rank is exactly settled, and the same
+individuals always have the precedence. You know that at Windsor Castle,
+if the Royal Three-Ply Silver Stick should happen to get in front of the
+Most Royal Double-and-Twisted Golden Rod, when the court is going in to
+dinner, something so dreadful would happen that we don't dare to think
+of it. It is certain that the soup would get cold while the Golden Rod
+was pitching the Silver Stick out of the Castle window into the moat,
+and perhaps the island of Great Britain itself would split in two. But
+the people are very careful that it never shall happen, so we shall
+probably never know what the effect would be. Among cows, as I say, the
+question is settled in short order, and in a different manner from what
+it sometimes is in other society. It is said that in other society there
+is sometimes a great scramble for the first place, for the leadership,
+as it is called, and that women, and men too, fight for what is called
+position; and in order to be first they will injure their neighbors by
+telling stories about them and by backbiting, which is the meanest kind
+of biting there is, not excepting the bite of fleas. But in cow society
+there is nothing of this detraction in order to get the first place at
+the crib, or the farther stall in the stable. If the question arises,
+the cows turn in, horns and all, and settle it with one square fight,
+and that ends it. I have often admired this trait in COWS.
+
+Besides Latin, I used to try to teach the cows a little poetry, and it
+is a very good plan. It does not do the cows much good, but it is very
+good exercise for a boy farmer. I used to commit to memory as good short
+poems as I could find (the cows liked to listen to “Thanatopsis” about
+as well as anything), and repeat them when I went to the pasture, and as
+I drove the cows home through the sweet ferns and down the rocky slopes.
+It improves a boy's elocution a great deal more than driving oxen.
+
+It is a fact, also, that if a boy repeats “Thanatopsis” while he is
+milking, that operation acquires a certain dignity.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE BOY AS A FARMER
+
+Boys in general would be very good farmers if the current notions about
+farming were not so very different from those they entertain. What
+passes for laziness is very often an unwillingness to farm in a
+particular way. For instance, some morning in early summer John is told
+to catch the sorrel mare, harness her into the spring wagon, and put in
+the buffalo and the best whip, for father is obliged to drive over to
+the “Corners, to see a man” about some cattle, to talk with the road
+commissioner, to go to the store for the “women folks,” and to attend
+to other important business; and very likely he will not be back till
+sundown. It must be very pressing business, for the old gentleman drives
+off in this way somewhere almost every pleasant day, and appears to have
+a great deal on his mind.
+
+Meantime, he tells John that he can play ball after he has done up the
+chores. As if the chores could ever be “done up” on a farm. He is first
+to clean out the horse-stable; then to take a bill-hook and cut down
+the thistles and weeds from the fence corners in the home mowing-lot and
+along the road towards the village; to dig up the docks round the garden
+patch; to weed out the beet-bed; to hoe the early potatoes; to rake the
+sticks and leaves out of the front yard; in short, there is work enough
+laid out for John to keep him busy, it seems to him, till he comes of
+age; and at half an hour to sundown he is to go for the cows “and mind
+he don't run 'em!”
+
+“Yes, sir,” says John, “is that all?”
+
+“Well, if you get through in good season, you might pick over those
+potatoes in the cellar; they are sprouting; they ain't fit to eat.”
+
+John is obliged to his father, for if there is any sort of chore more
+cheerful to a boy than another, on a pleasant day, it is rubbing the
+sprouts off potatoes in a dark cellar. And the old gentleman mounts
+his wagon and drives away down the enticing road, with the dog bounding
+along beside the wagon, and refusing to come back at John's call. John
+half wishes he were the dog. The dog knows the part of farming that
+suits him. He likes to run along the road and see all the dogs and
+other people, and he likes best of all to lie on the store steps at the
+Corners--while his master's horse is dozing at the post and his
+master is talking politics in the store--with the other dogs of his
+acquaintance, snapping at mutually annoying flies, and indulging in
+that delightful dog gossip which is expressed by a wag of the tail and a
+sniff of the nose. Nobody knows how many dogs' characters are destroyed
+in this gossip, or how a dog may be able to insinuate suspicion by a wag
+of the tail as a man can by a shrug of the shoulders, or sniff a slander
+as a man can suggest one by raising his eyebrows.
+
+John looks after the old gentleman driving off in state, with the
+odorous buffalo-robe and the new whip, and he thinks that is the sort of
+farming he would like to do. And he cries after his departing parent,
+
+“Say, father, can't I go over to the farther pasture and salt the
+cattle?” John knows that he could spend half a day very pleasantly in
+going over to that pasture, looking for bird's nests and shying at red
+squirrels on the way, and who knows but he might “see” a sucker in the
+meadow brook, and perhaps get a “jab” at him with a sharp stick. He
+knows a hole where there is a whopper; and one of his plans in life
+is to go some day and snare him, and bring him home in triumph. It is
+therefore strongly impressed upon his mind that the cattle want salting.
+But his father, without turning his head, replies,
+
+“No, they don't need salting any more 'n you do!” And the old equipage
+goes rattling down the road, and John whistles his disappointment. When
+I was a boy on a farm, and I suppose it is so now, cattle were never
+salted half enough!
+
+John goes to his chores, and gets through the stable as soon as he can,
+for that must be done; but when it comes to the out-door work, that
+rather drags. There are so many things to distract the attention--a
+chipmunk in the fence, a bird on a near-tree, and a hen-hawk circling
+high in the air over the barnyard. John loses a little time in stoning
+the chipmunk, which rather likes the sport, and in watching the bird, to
+find where its nest is; and he convinces himself that he ought to watch
+the hawk, lest it pounce upon the chickens, and therefore, with an easy
+conscience, he spends fifteen minutes in hallooing to that distant bird,
+and follows it away out of sight over the woods, and then wishes it
+would come back again. And then a carriage with two horses, and a trunk
+on behind, goes along the road; and there is a girl in the carriage who
+looks out at John, who is suddenly aware that his trousers are patched
+on each knee and in two places behind; and he wonders if she is rich,
+and whose name is on the trunk, and how much the horses cost, and
+whether that nice-looking man is the girl's father, and if that boy on
+the seat with the driver is her brother, and if he has to do chores;
+and as the gay sight disappears, John falls to thinking about the great
+world beyond the farm, of cities, and people who are always dressed up,
+and a great many other things of which he has a very dim notion. And
+then a boy, whom John knows, rides by in a wagon with his father, and
+the boy makes a face at John, and John returns the greeting with a twist
+of his own visage and some symbolic gestures. All these things take
+time. The work of cutting down the big weeds gets on slowly, although it
+is not very disagreeable, or would not be if it were play. John imagines
+that yonder big thistle is some whiskered villain, of whom he has read
+in a fairy book, and he advances on him with “Die, ruffian!” and
+slashes off his head with the bill-hook; or he charges upon the rows of
+mullein-stalks as if they were rebels in regimental ranks, and hews them
+down without mercy. What fun it might be if there were only another boy
+there to help. But even war, single handed, gets to be tiresome. It is
+dinner-time before John finishes the weeds, and it is cow-time before
+John has made much impression on the garden.
+
+This garden John has no fondness for. He would rather hoe corn all day
+than work in it. Father seems to think that it is easy work that John
+can do, because it is near the house! John's continual plan in this life
+is to go fishing. When there comes a rainy day, he attempts to carry it
+out. But ten chances to one his father has different views. As it rains
+so that work cannot be done out-doors, it is a good time to work in
+the garden. He can run into the house between the heavy showers. John
+accordingly detests the garden; and the only time he works briskly in it
+is when he has a stent set, to do so much weeding before the Fourth of
+July. If he is spry, he can make an extra holiday the Fourth and the
+day after. Two days of gunpowder and ball-playing! When I was a boy, I
+supposed there was some connection between such and such an amount of
+work done on the farm and our national freedom. I doubted if there could
+be any Fourth of July if my stent was not done. I, at least, worked for
+my Independence.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING
+
+There are so many bright spots in the life of a farm-boy, that I
+sometimes think I should like to live the life over again; I should
+almost be willing to be a girl if it were not for the chores. There is a
+great comfort to a boy in the amount of work he can get rid of doing. It
+is sometimes astonishing how slow he can go on an errand,--he who leads
+the school in a race. The world is new and interesting to him, and there
+is so much to take his attention off, when he is sent to do anything.
+Perhaps he himself couldn't explain why, when he is sent to the
+neighbor's after yeast, he stops to stone the frogs; he is not exactly
+cruel, but he wants to see if he can hit 'em. No other living thing can
+go so slow as a boy sent on an errand. His legs seem to be lead, unless
+he happens to espy a woodchuck in an adjoining lot, when he gives chase
+to it like a deer; and it is a curious fact about boys, that two will
+be a great deal slower in doing anything than one, and that the more you
+have to help on a piece of work the less is accomplished. Boys have
+a great power of helping each other to do nothing; and they are so
+innocent about it, and unconscious. “I went as quick as ever I could,”
+ says the boy: his father asks him why he did n't stay all night, when he
+has been absent three hours on a ten-minute errand. The sarcasm has no
+effect on the boy.
+
+Going after the cows was a serious thing in my day. I had to climb a
+hill, which was covered with wild strawberries in the season. Could any
+boy pass by those ripe berries? And then in the fragrant hill pasture
+there were beds of wintergreen with red berries, tufts of columbine,
+roots of sassafras to be dug, and dozens of things good to eat or to
+smell, that I could not resist. It sometimes even lay in my way to climb
+a tree to look for a crow's nest, or to swing in the top, and to try if
+I could see the steeple of the village church. It became very
+important sometimes for me to see that steeple; and in the midst of my
+investigations the tin horn would blow a great blast from the farmhouse,
+which would send a cold chill down my back in the hottest days. I knew
+what it meant. It had a frightfully impatient quaver in it, not at all
+like the sweet note that called us to dinner from the hay-field. It
+said, “Why on earth does n't that boy come home? It is almost dark, and
+the cows ain't milked!” And that was the time the cows had to start into
+a brisk pace and make up for lost time. I wonder if any boy ever drove
+the cows home late, who did not say that the cows were at the very
+farther end of the pasture, and that “Old Brindle” was hidden in the
+woods, and he couldn't find her for ever so long! The brindle cow is the
+boy's scapegoat, many a time.
+
+No other boy knows how to appreciate a holiday as the farm-boy does;
+and his best ones are of a peculiar kind. Going fishing is of course one
+sort. The excitement of rigging up the tackle, digging the bait, and the
+anticipation of great luck! These are pure pleasures, enjoyed because
+they are rare. Boys who can go a-fishing any time care but little
+for it. Tramping all day through bush and brier, fighting flies and
+mosquitoes, and branches that tangle the line, and snags that break the
+hook, and returning home late and hungry, with wet feet and a string of
+speckled trout on a willow twig, and having the family crowd out at the
+kitchen door to look at 'em, and say, “Pretty well done for you, bub;
+did you catch that big one yourself?”--this is also pure happiness,
+the like of which the boy will never have again, not if he comes to be
+selectman and deacon and to “keep store.”
+
+But the holidays I recall with delight were the two days in spring and
+fall, when we went to the distant pasture-land, in a neighboring town,
+maybe, to drive thither the young cattle and colts, and to bring them
+back again. It was a wild and rocky upland where our great pasture was,
+many miles from home, the road to it running by a brawling river, and up
+a dashing brook-side among great hills. What a day's adventure it was!
+It was like a journey to Europe. The night before, I could scarcely
+sleep for thinking of it! and there was no trouble about getting me
+up at sunrise that morning. The breakfast was eaten, the luncheon
+was packed in a large basket, with bottles of root beer and a jug of
+switchel, which packing I superintended with the greatest interest;
+and then the cattle were to be collected for the march, and the horses
+hitched up. Did I shirk any duty? Was I slow? I think not. I was willing
+to run my legs off after the frisky steers, who seemed to have an idea
+they were going on a lark, and frolicked about, dashing into all gates,
+and through all bars except the right ones; and how cheerfully I did
+yell at them.
+
+It was a glorious chance to “holler,” and I have never since heard
+any public speaker on the stump or at camp-meeting who could make more
+noise. I have often thought it fortunate that the amount of noise in a
+boy does not increase in proportion to his size; if it did, the world
+could not contain it.
+
+The whole day was full of excitement and of freedom. We were away from
+the farm, which to a boy is one of the best parts of farming; we saw
+other farms and other people at work; I had the pleasure of marching
+along, and swinging my whip, past boys whom I knew, who were picking up
+stones. Every turn of the road, every bend and rapid of the river, the
+great bowlders by the wayside, the watering-troughs, the giant pine that
+had been struck by lightning, the mysterious covered bridge over the
+river where it was, most swift and rocky and foamy, the chance eagle in
+the blue sky, the sense of going somewhere,--why, as I recall all these
+things I feel that even the Prince Imperial, as he used to dash on
+horseback through the Bois de Boulogne, with fifty mounted hussars
+clattering at his heels, and crowds of people cheering, could not have
+been as happy as was I, a boy in short jacket and shorter pantaloons,
+trudging in the dust that day behind the steers and colts, cracking my
+black-stock whip.
+
+I wish the journey would never end; but at last, by noon, we reach the
+pastures and turn in the herd; and after making the tour of the lots to
+make sure there are no breaks in the fences, we take our luncheon from
+the wagon and eat it under the trees by the spring. This is the supreme
+moment of the day. This is the way to live; this is like the Swiss
+Family Robinson, and all the rest of my delightful acquaintances in
+romance. Baked beans, rye-and-indian bread (moist, remember), doughnuts
+and cheese, pie, and root beer. What richness! You may live to dine
+at Delmonico's, or, if those Frenchmen do not eat each other up, at
+Philippe's, in Rue Montorgueil in Paris, where the dear old Thackeray
+used to eat as good a dinner as anybody; but you will get there neither
+doughnuts, nor pie, nor root beer, nor anything so good as that luncheon
+at noon in the old pasture, high among the Massachusetts hills! Nor
+will you ever, if you live to be the oldest boy in the world, have any
+holiday equal to the one I have described. But I always regretted that I
+did not take along a fishline, just to “throw in” the brook we passed. I
+know there were trout there.
+
+
+
+
+IV. NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY
+
+Say what you will about the general usefulness of boys, it is my
+impression that a farm without a boy would very soon come to grief.
+What the boy does is the life of the farm. He is the factotum, always
+in demand, always expected to do the thousand indispensable things
+that nobody else will do. Upon him fall all the odds and ends, the most
+difficult things. After everybody else is through, he has to finish
+up. His work is like a woman's,--perpetual waiting on others. Everybody
+knows how much easier it is to eat a good dinner than it is to wash
+the dishes afterwards. Consider what a boy on a farm is required to do;
+things that must be done, or life would actually stop.
+
+It is understood, in the first place, that he is to do all the errands,
+to go to the store, to the post office, and to carry all sorts of
+messages. If he had as many legs as a centipede, they would tire before
+night. His two short limbs seem to him entirely inadequate to the task.
+He would like to have as many legs as a wheel has spokes, and rotate
+about in the same way. This he sometimes tries to do; and people who
+have seen him “turning cart-wheels” along the side of the road have
+supposed that he was amusing himself, and idling his time; he was only
+trying to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he could economize
+his legs and do his errands with greater dispatch. He practices standing
+on his head, in order to accustom himself to any position. Leapfrog
+is one of his methods of getting over the ground quickly. He would
+willingly go an errand any distance if he could leap-frog it with a
+few other boys. He has a natural genius for combining pleasure with
+business. This is the reason why, when he is sent to the spring for a
+pitcher of water, and the family are waiting at the dinner-table, he is
+absent so long; for he stops to poke the frog that sits on the stone,
+or, if there is a penstock, to put his hand over the spout and squirt
+the water a little while. He is the one who spreads the grass when the
+men have cut it; he mows it away in the barn; he rides the horse to
+cultivate the corn, up and down the hot, weary rows; he picks up the
+potatoes when they are dug; he drives the cows night and morning; he
+brings wood and water and splits kindling; he gets up the horse and puts
+out the horse; whether he is in the house or out of it, there is always
+something for him to do. Just before school in winter he shovels paths;
+in summer he turns the grindstone. He knows where there are lots of
+winter-greens and sweet flag-root, but instead of going for them, he is
+to stay in-doors and pare apples and stone raisins and pound something
+in a mortar. And yet, with his mind full of schemes of what he would
+like to do, and his hands full of occupations, he is an idle boy who has
+nothing to busy himself with but school and chores! He would gladly do
+all the work if somebody else would do the chores, he thinks, and yet I
+doubt if any boy ever amounted to anything in the world, or was of much
+use as a man, who did not enjoy the advantages of a liberal education in
+the way of chores.
+
+A boy on a farm is nothing without his pets; at least a dog, and
+probably rabbits, chickens, ducks, and guinea-hens. A guinea-hen suits a
+boy. It is entirely useless, and makes a more disagreeable noise than
+a Chinese gong. I once domesticated a young fox which a neighbor had
+caught. It is a mistake to suppose the fox cannot be tamed. Jacko was a
+very clever little animal, and behaved, in all respects, with propriety.
+He kept Sunday as well as any day, and all the ten commandments that he
+could understand. He was a very graceful playfellow, and seemed to have
+an affection for me. He lived in a wood-pile in the dooryard, and when I
+lay down at the entrance to his house and called him, he would come out
+and sit on his tail and lick my face just like a grown person. I taught
+him a great many tricks and all the virtues. That year I had a large
+number of hens, and Jacko went about among them with the most perfect
+indifference, never looking on them to lust after them, as I could see,
+and never touching an egg or a feather. So excellent was his reputation
+that I would have trusted him in the hen-roost in the dark without
+counting the hens. In short, he was domesticated, and I was fond of him
+and very proud of him, exhibiting him to all our visitors as an example
+of what affectionate treatment would do in subduing the brute instincts.
+I preferred him to my dog, whom I had, with much patience, taught to go
+up a long hill alone and surround the cows, and drive them home from the
+remote pasture. He liked the fun of it at first, but by and by he seemed
+to get the notion that it was a “chore,” and when I whistled for him to
+go for the cows, he would turn tail and run the other way, and the more
+I whistled and threw stones at him, the faster he would run. His name
+was Turk, and I should have sold him if he had not been the kind of dog
+that nobody will buy. I suppose he was not a cow-dog, but what they call
+a sheep-dog. At least, when he got big enough, he used to get into
+the pasture and chase the sheep to death. That was the way he got into
+trouble, and lost his valuable life. A dog is of great use on a farm,
+and that is the reason a boy likes him. He is good to bite peddlers and
+small children, and run out and yelp at wagons that pass by, and to
+howl all night when the moon shines. And yet, if I were a boy again, the
+first thing I would have should be a dog; for dogs are great companions,
+and as active and spry as a boy at doing nothing. They are also good to
+bark at woodchuck-holes.
+
+A good dog will bark at a woodchuck-hole long after the animal has
+retired to a remote part of his residence, and escaped by another hole.
+This deceives the woodchuck. Some of the most delightful hours of my
+life have been spent in hiding and watching the hole where the dog was
+not. What an exquisite thrill ran through my frame when the timid nose
+appeared, was withdrawn, poked out again, and finally followed by the
+entire animal, who looked cautiously about, and then hopped away to feed
+on the clover. At that moment I rushed in, occupied the “home base,”
+ yelled to Turk, and then danced with delight at the combat between the
+spunky woodchuck and the dog. They were about the same size, but science
+and civilization won the day. I did not reflect then that it would have
+been more in the interest of civilization if the woodchuck had killed
+the dog. I do not know why it is that boys so like to hunt and kill
+animals; but the excuse that I gave in this case for the murder was,
+that the woodchuck ate the clover and trod it down, and, in fact, was a
+woodchuck. It was not till long after that I learned with surprise that
+he is a rodent mammal, of the species Arctomys monax, is called at the
+West a ground-hog, and is eaten by people of color with great relish.
+
+But I have forgotten my beautiful fox. Jacko continued to deport himself
+well until the young chickens came; he was actually cured of the
+fox vice of chicken-stealing. He used to go with me about the coops,
+pricking up his ears in an intelligent manner, and with a demure eye and
+the most virtuous droop of the tail. Charming fox! If he had held out
+a little while longer, I should have put him into a Sunday-school book.
+But I began to miss chickens. They disappeared mysteriously in the
+night. I would not suspect Jacko at first, for he looked so honest, and
+in the daytime seemed to be as much interested in the chickens as I
+was. But one morning, when I went to call him, I found feathers at the
+entrance of his hole,--chicken feathers. He couldn't deny it. He was a
+thief. His fox nature had come out under severe temptation. And he died
+an unnatural death. He had a thousand virtues and one crime. But that
+crime struck at the foundation of society. He deceived and stole; he
+was a liar and a thief, and no pretty ways could hide the fact. His
+intelligent, bright face couldn't save him. If he had been honest, he
+might have grown up to be a large, ornamental fox.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE BOY'S SUNDAY
+
+Sunday in the New England hill towns used to begin Saturday night at
+sundown; and the sun is lost to sight behind the hills there before it
+has set by the almanac. I remember that we used to go by the almanac
+Saturday night and by the visible disappearance Sunday night. On
+Saturday night we very slowly yielded to the influences of the holy
+time, which were settling down upon us, and submitted to the ablutions
+which were as inevitable as Sunday; but when the sun (and it never
+moved so slow) slid behind the hills Sunday night, the effect upon the
+watching boy was like a shock from a galvanic battery; something flashed
+through all his limbs and set them in motion, and no “play” ever seemed
+so sweet to him as that between sundown and dark Sunday night. This,
+however, was on the supposition that he had conscientiously kept Sunday,
+and had not gone in swimming and got drowned. This keeping of Saturday
+night instead of Sunday night we did not very well understand; but it
+seemed, on the whole, a good thing that we should rest Saturday night
+when we were tired, and play Sunday night when we were rested. I
+supposed, however, that it was an arrangement made to suit the big boys
+who wanted to go “courting” Sunday night. Certainly they were not to be
+blamed, for Sunday was the day when pretty girls were most fascinating,
+and I have never since seen any so lovely as those who used to sit in
+the gallery and in the singers' seats in the bare old meeting-houses.
+
+Sunday to the country farmer-boy was hardly the relief that it was to
+the other members of the family; for the same chores must be done that
+day as on others, and he could not divert his mind with whistling,
+hand-springs, or sending the dog into the river after sticks. He had to
+submit, in the first place, to the restraint of shoes and stockings. He
+read in the Old Testament that when Moses came to holy ground, he put
+off his shoes; but the boy was obliged to put his on, upon the holy
+day, not only to go to meeting, but while he sat at home. Only the
+emancipated country-boy, who is as agile on his bare feet as a young
+kid, and rejoices in the pressure of the warm soft earth, knows what a
+hardship it is to tie on stiff shoes. The monks who put peas in their
+shoes as a penance do not suffer more than the country-boy in his
+penitential Sunday shoes. I recall the celerity with which he used to
+kick them off at sundown.
+
+Sunday morning was not an idle one for the farmer-boy. He must rise
+tolerably early, for the cows were to be milked and driven to pasture;
+family prayers were a little longer than on other days; there were the
+Sunday-school verses to be relearned, for they did not stay in mind over
+night; perhaps the wagon was to be greased before the neighbors began to
+drive by; and the horse was to be caught out of the pasture, ridden home
+bareback, and harnessed.
+
+This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun usually,
+and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been wanted
+for taking the family to meeting. It was so peaceful and still in the
+pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so playful, the
+colts never so frisky. Round and round the lot the boy went calling, in
+an entreating Sunday voice, “Jock, jock, jock, jock,” and shaking his
+salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect, and shaking tails and
+flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and gave the boy a pretty
+good race before he could coax the nose of one of them into his dish.
+The boy got angry, and came very near saying “dum it,” but he rather
+enjoyed the fun, after all.
+
+The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety was divided between the set
+of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory of the
+Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was through the
+house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept running hither and
+thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or
+to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch of caraway-seed.
+Already the deacon's mare, with a wagon-load of the deacon's folks, had
+gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up
+clouds of dust, while the good deacon sat jerking the reins, in an
+automatic way, and the “womenfolks” patiently saw the dust settle upon
+their best summer finery. Wagon after wagon went along the sandy
+road, and when our boy's family started, they became part of a long
+procession, which sent up a mile of dust and a pungent, if not pious
+smell of buffalo-robes. There were fiery horses in the trail which had
+to be held in, for it was neither etiquette nor decent to pass anybody
+on Sunday. It was a great delight to the farmer-boy to see all this
+procession of horses, and to exchange sly winks with the other boys, who
+leaned over the wagon-seats for that purpose. Occasionally a boy rode
+behind, with his back to the family, and his pantomime was always some
+thing wonderful to see, and was considered very daring and wicked.
+
+The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square building,
+without a steeple. Within it had a lofty pulpit, with doors underneath
+and closets where sacred things were kept, and where the tithing-men
+were supposed to imprison bad boys. The pews were square, with seats
+facing each other, those on one side low for the children, and all with
+hinges, so that they could be raised when the congregation stood up for
+prayers and leaned over the backs of the pews, as horses meet each other
+across a pasture fence. After prayers these seats used to be slammed
+down with a long-continued clatter, which seemed to the boys about
+the best part of the exercises. The galleries were very high, and the
+singers' seats, where the pretty girls sat, were the most conspicuous
+of all. To sit in the gallery away from the family, was a privilege not
+often granted to the boy. The tithing-man, who carried a long rod and
+kept order in the house, and out-doors at noontime, sat in the gallery,
+and visited any boy who whispered or found curious passages in the
+Bible and showed them to another boy. It was an awful moment when the
+bushy-headed tithing-man approached a boy in sermon-time. The eyes of
+the whole congregation were on him, and he could feel the guilt ooze out
+of his burning face.
+
+At noon was Sunday-school, and after that, before the afternoon service,
+in summer, the boys had a little time to eat their luncheon together
+at the watering-trough, where some of the elders were likely to be
+gathered, talking very solemnly about cattle; or they went over to
+a neighboring barn to see the calves; or they slipped off down the
+roadside to a place where they could dig sassafras or the root of the
+sweet-flag, roots very fragrant in the mind of many a boy with religious
+associations to this day. There was often an odor of sassafras in the
+afternoon service. It used to stand in my mind as a substitute for the
+Old Testament incense of the Jews. Something in the same way the big
+bass-viol in the choir took the place of “David's harp of solemn sound.”
+
+The going home from meeting was more cheerful and lively than the coming
+to it. There was all the bustle of getting the horses out of the sheds
+and bringing them round to the meeting-house steps. At noon the boys
+sometimes sat in the wagons and swung the whips without cracking them:
+now it was permitted to give them a little snap in order to bring the
+horses up in good style; and the boy was rather proud of the horse if
+it pranced a little while the timid “women-folks” were trying to get in.
+The boy had an eye for whatever life and stir there was in a New England
+Sunday. He liked to drive home fast. The old house and the farm looked
+pleasant to him. There was an extra dinner when they reached home, and a
+cheerful consciousness of duty performed made it a pleasant dinner. Long
+before sundown the Sunday-school book had been read, and the boy sat
+waiting in the house with great impatience the signal that the “day of
+rest” was over. A boy may not be very wicked, and yet not see the need
+of “rest.” Neither his idea of rest nor work is that of older farmers.
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE
+
+If there is one thing more than another that hardens the lot of the
+farmer-boy, it is the grindstone. Turning grindstones to grind scythes
+is one of those heroic but unobtrusive occupations for which one gets no
+credit. It is a hopeless kind of task, and, however faithfully the crank
+is turned, it is one that brings little reputation. There is a great
+deal of poetry about haying--I mean for those not engaged in it. One
+likes to hear the whetting of the scythes on a fresh morning and the
+response of the noisy bobolink, who always sits upon the fence and
+superintends the cutting of the dew-laden grass. There is a sort
+of music in the “swish” and a rhythm in the swing of the scythes in
+concert. The boy has not much time to attend to it, for it is lively
+business “spreading” after half a dozen men who have only to walk along
+and lay the grass low, while the boy has the whole hay-field on his
+hands. He has little time for the poetry of haying, as he struggles
+along, filling the air with the wet mass which he shakes over his head,
+and picking his way with short legs and bare feet amid the short and
+freshly cut stubble.
+
+But if the scythes cut well and swing merrily, it is due to the boy
+who turned the grindstone. Oh, it was nothing to do, just turn the
+grindstone a few minutes for this and that one before breakfast; any
+“hired man” was authorized to order the boy to turn the grindstone. How
+they did bear on, those great strapping fellows! Turn, turn, turn,
+what a weary go it was. For my part, I used to like a grindstone that
+“wabbled” a good deal on its axis, for when I turned it fast, it put
+the grinder on a lively lookout for cutting his hands, and entirely
+satisfied his desire that I should “turn faster.” It was some sport to
+make the water fly and wet the grinder, suddenly starting up quickly and
+surprising him when I was turning very slowly. I used to wish sometimes
+that I could turn fast enough to make the stone fly into a dozen
+pieces. Steady turning is what the grinders like, and any boy who
+turns steadily, so as to give an even motion to the stone, will be much
+praised, and will be in demand. I advise any boy who desires to do this
+sort of work to turn steadily. If he does it by jerks and in a fitful
+manner, the “hired men” will be very apt to dispense with his services
+and turn the grindstone for each other.
+
+This is one of the most disagreeable tasks of the boy farmer, and, hard
+as it is, I do, not know why it is supposed to belong especially to
+childhood. But it is, and one of the certain marks that second childhood
+has come to a man on a farm is, that he is asked to turn the grindstone
+as if he were a boy again. When the old man is good for nothing else,
+when he can neither mow nor pitch, and scarcely “rake after,” he can
+turn grindstone, and it is in this way that he renews his youth. “Ain't
+you ashamed to have your granther turn the grindstone?” asks the hired
+man of the boy. So the boy takes hold and turns himself, till his little
+back aches. When he gets older, he wishes he had replied, “Ain't you
+ashamed to make either an old man or a little boy do such hard grinding
+work?”
+
+Doing the regular work of this world is not much, the boy thinks, but
+the wearisome part is the waiting on the people who do the work. And the
+boy is not far wrong. This is what women and boys have to do on a farm,
+wait upon everybody who--works. The trouble with the boy's life is, that
+he has no time that he can call his own. He is, like a barrel of beer,
+always on draft. The men-folks, having worked in the regular hours, lie
+down and rest, stretch themselves idly in the shade at noon, or lounge
+about after supper. Then the boy, who has done nothing all day but turn
+grindstone, and spread hay, and rake after, and run his little legs off
+at everybody's beck and call, is sent on some errand or some household
+chore, in order that time shall not hang heavy on his hands. The boy
+comes nearer to perpetual motion than anything else in nature, only it
+is not altogether a voluntary motion. The time that the farm-boy gets
+for his own is usually at the end of a stent. We used to be given a
+certain piece of corn to hoe, or a certain quantity of corn to husk in
+so many days. If we finished the task before the time set, we had the
+remainder to ourselves. In my day it used to take very sharp work to
+gain anything, but we were always anxious to take the chance. I think we
+enjoyed the holiday in anticipation quite as much as we did when we had
+won it. Unless it was training-day, or Fourth of July, or the circus was
+coming, it was a little difficult to find anything big enough to fill
+our anticipations of the fun we would have in the day or the two or
+three days we had earned. We did not want to waste the time on any
+common thing. Even going fishing in one of the wild mountain brooks was
+hardly up to the mark, for we could sometimes do that on a rainy day.
+Going down to the village store was not very exciting, and was, on
+the whole, a waste of our precious time. Unless we could get out
+our military company, life was apt to be a little blank, even on the
+holidays for which we had worked so hard. If you went to see another
+boy, he was probably at work in the hay-field or the potato-patch, and
+his father looked at you askance. You sometimes took hold and helped
+him, so that he could go and play with you; but it was usually time to
+go for the cows before the task was done. The fact is, or used to
+be, that the amusements of a boy in the country are not many. Snaring
+“suckers” out of the deep meadow brook used to be about as good as any
+that I had. The North American sucker is not an engaging animal in all
+respects; his body is comely enough, but his mouth is puckered up like
+that of a purse. The mouth is not formed for the gentle angle-worm nor
+the delusive fly of the fishermen. It is necessary, therefore, to snare
+the fish if you want him. In the sunny days he lies in the deep pools,
+by some big stone or near the bank, poising himself quite still, or only
+stirring his fins a little now and then, as an elephant moves his ears.
+He will lie so for hours, or rather float, in perfect idleness and
+apparent bliss. The boy who also has a holiday, but cannot keep still,
+comes along and peeps over the bank. “Golly, ain't he a big one!”
+ Perhaps he is eighteen inches long, and weighs two or three pounds. He
+lies there among his friends, little fish and big ones, quite a school
+of them, perhaps a district school, that only keeps in warm days in
+the summer. The pupils seem to have little to learn, except to balance
+themselves and to turn gracefully with a flirt of the tail. Not much
+is taught but “deportment,” and some of the old suckers are perfect
+Turveydrops in that. The boy is armed with a pole and a stout line, and
+on the end of it a brass wire bent into a hoop, which is a slipnoose,
+and slides together when anything is caught in it. The boy approaches
+the bank and looks over. There he lies, calm as a whale. The boy devours
+him with his eyes. He is almost too much excited to drop the snare into
+the water without making a noise. A puff of wind comes and ruffles the
+surface, so that he cannot see the fish. It is calm again, and there he
+still is, moving his fins in peaceful security. The boy lowers his snare
+behind the fish and slips it along. He intends to get it around him
+just back of the gills and then elevate him with a sudden jerk. It is a
+delicate operation, for the snare will turn a little, and if it hits
+the fish, he is off. However, it goes well; the wire is almost in
+place, when suddenly the fish, as if he had a warning in a dream, for he
+appears to see nothing, moves his tail just a little, glides out of the
+loop, and with no seeming appearance of frustrating any one's plans,
+lounges over to the other side of the pool; and there he reposes just as
+if he was not spoiling the boy's holiday. This slight change of base on
+the part of the fish requires the boy to reorganize his whole campaign,
+get a new position on the bank, a new line of approach, and patiently
+wait for the wind and sun before he can lower his line. This time,
+cunning and patience are rewarded. The hoop encircles the unsuspecting
+fish. The boy's eyes almost start from his head as he gives a tremendous
+jerk, and feels by the dead-weight that he has got him fast. Out he
+comes, up he goes in the air, and the boy runs to look at him. In this
+transaction, however, no one can be more surprised than the sucker.
+
+
+
+
+VII. FICTION AND SENTIMENT
+
+The boy farmer does not appreciate school vacations as highly as his
+city cousin. When school keeps, he has only to “do chores and go to
+school,” but between terms there are a thousand things on the farm that
+have been left for the boy to do. Picking up stones in the pastures and
+piling them in heaps used to be one of them. Some lots appeared to
+grow stones, or else the sun every year drew them to the surface, as it
+coaxes the round cantelopes out of the soft garden soil; it is certain
+that there were fields that always gave the boys this sort of fall work.
+And very lively work it was on frosty mornings for the barefooted boys,
+who were continually turning up the larger stones in order to stand for
+a moment in the warm place that had been covered from the frost. A boy
+can stand on one leg as well as a Holland stork; and the boy who found
+a warm spot for the sole of his foot was likely to stand in it until
+the words, “Come, stir your stumps,” broke in discordantly upon his
+meditations. For the boy is very much given to meditations. If he had
+his way, he would do nothing in a hurry; he likes to stop and think
+about things, and enjoy his work as he goes along. He picks up potatoes
+as if each one were a lump of gold just turned out of the dirt, and
+requiring careful examination.
+
+Although the country-boy feels a little joy when school breaks up (as
+he does when anything breaks up, or any change takes place), since he is
+released from the discipline and restraint of it, yet the school is his
+opening into the world,--his romance. Its opportunities for enjoyment
+are numberless. He does not exactly know what he is set at books for;
+he takes spelling rather as an exercise for his lungs, standing up and
+shouting out the words with entire recklessness of consequences; he
+grapples doggedly with arithmetic and geography as something that must
+be cleared out of his way before recess, but not at all with the zest
+he would dig a woodchuck out of his hole. But recess! Was ever any
+enjoyment so keen as that with which a boy rushes out of the schoolhouse
+door for the ten minutes of recess? He is like to burst with animal
+spirits; he runs like a deer; he can nearly fly; and he throws himself
+into play with entire self-forgetfulness, and an energy that would
+overturn the world if his strength were proportioned to it. For
+ten minutes the world is absolutely his; the weights are taken off,
+restraints are loosed, and he is his own master for that brief
+time,--as he never again will be if he lives to be as old as the king
+of Thule,--and nobody knows how old he was. And there is the nooning,
+a solid hour, in which vast projects can be carried out which have been
+slyly matured during the school-hours: expeditions are undertaken; wars
+are begun between the Indians on one side and the settlers on the other;
+the military company is drilled (without uniforms or arms), or games are
+carried on which involve miles of running, and an expenditure of wind
+sufficient to spell the spelling-book through at the highest pitch.
+
+Friendships are formed, too, which are fervent, if not enduring, and
+enmities contracted which are frequently “taken out” on the spot, after
+a rough fashion boys have of settling as they go along; cases of long
+credit, either in words or trade, are not frequent with boys; boot on
+jack-knives must be paid on the nail; and it is considered much
+more honorable to out with a personal grievance at once, even if the
+explanation is made with the fists, than to pretend fair, and then take
+a sneaking revenge on some concealed opportunity. The country-boy at the
+district school is introduced into a wider world than he knew at home,
+in many ways. Some big boy brings to school a copy of the Arabian
+Nights, a dog-eared copy, with cover, title-page, and the last leaves
+missing, which is passed around, and slyly read under the desk,
+and perhaps comes to the little boy whose parents disapprove of
+novel-reading, and have no work of fiction in the house except a pious
+fraud called “Six Months in a Convent,” and the latest comic almanac.
+The boy's eyes dilate as he steals some of the treasures out of the
+wondrous pages, and he longs to lose himself in the land of enchantment
+open before him. He tells at home that he has seen the most wonderful
+book that ever was, and a big boy has promised to lend it to him. “Is it
+a true book, John?” asks the grandmother; “because, if it is n't true,
+it is the worst thing that a boy can read.” (This happened years ago.)
+John cannot answer as to the truth of the book, and so does not bring it
+home; but he borrows it, nevertheless, and conceals it in the barn and,
+lying in the hay-mow, is lost in its enchantments many an odd hour when
+he is supposed to be doing chores. There were no chores in the Arabian
+Nights; the boy there had but to rub the ring and summon a genius, who
+would feed the calves and pick up chips and bring in wood in a minute.
+It was through this emblazoned portal that the boy walked into the world
+of books, which he soon found was larger than his own, and filled with
+people he longed to know.
+
+And the farmer-boy is not without his sentiment and his secrets, though
+he has never been at a children's party in his life, and, in fact, never
+has heard that children go into society when they are seven, and give
+regular wine-parties when they reach the ripe age of nine. But one of
+his regrets at having the summer school close is dimly connected with a
+little girl, whom he does not care much for, would a great deal rather
+play with a boy than with her at recess,--but whom he will not see again
+for some time,--a sweet little thing, who is very friendly with John,
+and with whom he has been known to exchange bits of candy wrapped up in
+paper, and for whom he cut in two his lead-pencil, and gave her half.
+At the last day of school she goes part way with John, and then he turns
+and goes a longer distance towards her home, so that it is late when
+he reaches his own. Is he late? He did n't know he was late; he came
+straight home when school was dismissed, only going a little way home
+with Alice Linton to help her carry her books. In a box in his chamber,
+which he has lately put a padlock on, among fishhooks and lines and
+baitboxes, odd pieces of brass, twine, early sweet apples, pop-corn,
+beechnuts, and other articles of value, are some little billets-doux,
+fancifully folded, three-cornered or otherwise, and written, I will
+warrant, in red or beautifully blue ink. These little notes are parting
+gifts at the close of school, and John, no doubt, gave his own in
+exchange for them, though the writing was an immense labor, and the
+folding was a secret bought of another boy for a big piece of sweet
+flag-root baked in sugar, a delicacy which John used to carry in his
+pantaloons-pocket until his pocket was in such a state that putting his
+fingers into it was about as good as dipping them into the sugar-bowl
+at home. Each precious note contained a lock or curl of girl's hair,--a
+rare collection of all colors, after John had been in school many terms,
+and had passed through a great many parting scenes,--black, brown, red,
+tow-color, and some that looked like spun gold and felt like silk.
+The sentiment contained in the notes was that which was common in the
+school, and expressed a melancholy foreboding of early death, and a
+touching desire to leave hair enough this side the grave to constitute
+a sort of strand of remembrance. With little variation, the poetry that
+made the hair precious was in the words, and, as a Cockney would say,
+set to the hair, following:
+
+   “This lock of hair,
+   Which I did wear,
+   Was taken from my head;
+   When this you see,
+   Remember me,
+   Long after I am dead.”
+
+John liked to read these verses, which always made a new and fresh
+impression with each lock of hair, and he was not critical; they were
+for him vehicles of true sentiment, and indeed they were what he used
+when he inclosed a clip of his own sandy hair to a friend. And it did
+not occur to him until he was a great deal older and less innocent, to
+smile at them. John felt that he would sacredly keep every lock of hair
+intrusted to him, though death should come on the wings of cholera and
+take away every one of these sad, red-ink correspondents. When John's
+big brother one day caught sight of these treasures, and brutally told
+him that he “had hair enough to stuff a horse-collar,” John was so
+outraged and shocked, as he should have been, at this rude invasion of
+his heart, this coarse suggestion, this profanation of his most delicate
+feeling, that he was kept from crying only by the resolution to “lick”
+ his brother as soon as ever he got big enough.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING
+
+One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts,
+hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after
+the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them,
+and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright October
+day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite
+so exhilarating as going nutting. Nor is the pleasure of it altogether
+destroyed for the boy by the consideration that he is making himself
+useful in obtaining supplies for the winter household. The getting-in of
+potatoes and corn is a different thing; that is the prose, but nutting
+is the poetry, of farm life. I am not sure but the boy would find it
+very irksome, though, if he were obliged to work at nut-gathering in
+order to procure food for the family. He is willing to make himself
+useful in his own way. The Italian boy, who works day after day at a
+huge pile of pine-cones, pounding and cracking them and taking out
+the long seeds, which are sold and eaten as we eat nuts (and which are
+almost as good as pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the Italians),
+probably does not see the fun of nutting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy
+here were set at pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening the prickly
+chestnut-burs as a task, he would think himself an ill-used boy. What a
+hardship the prickles in his fingers would be! But now he digs them out
+with his jack-knife, and enjoys the process, on the whole. The boy is
+willing to do any amount of work if it is called play.
+
+In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble and industrious than the
+boy. I like to see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove; they
+leave a desert behind them like the seventeen-year locusts. To climb a
+tree and shake it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit, and pass to the
+next, is the sport of a brief time. I have seen a legion of boys scamper
+over our grass-plot under the chestnut-trees, each one as active as if
+he were a new patent picking-machine, sweeping the ground clean of nuts,
+and disappear over the hill before I could go to the door and speak
+to them about it. Indeed, I have noticed that boys don't care much for
+conversation with the owners of fruit-trees. They could speedily make
+their fortunes if they would work as rapidly in cotton-fields. I have
+never seen anything like it, except a flock of turkeys removing the
+grasshoppers from a piece of pasture.
+
+Perhaps it is not generally known that we get the idea of some of
+our best military maneuvers from the turkey. The deploying of the
+skirmish-line in advance of an army is one of them. The drum-major of
+our holiday militia companies is copied exactly from the turkey gobbler;
+he has the same splendid appearance, the same proud step, and the same
+martial aspect. The gobbler does not lead his forces in the field, but
+goes behind them, like the colonel of a regiment, so that he can see
+every part of the line and direct its movements. This resemblance is
+one of the most singular things in natural history. I like to watch the
+gobbler maneuvering his forces in a grasshopper-field. He throws out
+his company of two dozen turkeys in a crescent-shaped skirmish-line, the
+number disposed at equal distances, while he walks majestically in
+the rear. They advance rapidly, picking right and left, with military
+precision, killing the foe and disposing of the dead bodies with the
+same peck. Nobody has yet discovered how many grasshoppers a turkey will
+hold; but he is very much like a boy at a Thanksgiving dinner,--he keeps
+on eating as long as the supplies last. The gobbler, in one of these
+raids, does not condescend to grab a single grasshopper,--at least, not
+while anybody is watching him. But I suppose he makes up for it when his
+dignity cannot be injured by having spectators of his voracity; perhaps
+he falls upon the grasshoppers when they are driven into a corner of the
+field. But he is only fattening himself for destruction; like all
+greedy persons, he comes to a bad end. And if the turkeys had any
+Sunday-school, they would be taught this.
+
+The New England boy used to look forward to Thanksgiving as the great
+event of the year. He was apt to get stents set him,--so much corn to
+husk, for instance, before that day, so that he could have an extra
+play-spell; and in order to gain a day or two, he would work at his
+task with the rapidity of half a dozen boys. He always had the day
+after Thanksgiving as a holiday, and this was the day he counted on.
+Thanksgiving itself was rather an awful festival,--very much like
+Sunday, except for the enormous dinner, which filled his imagination
+for months before as completely as it did his stomach for that day and
+a week after. There was an impression in the house that that dinner
+was the most important event since the landing from the Mayflower.
+Heliogabalus, who did not resemble a Pilgrim Father at all, but who had
+prepared for himself in his day some very sumptuous banquets in Rome,
+and ate a great deal of the best he could get (and liked peacocks
+stuffed with asafetida, for one thing), never had anything like a
+Thanksgiving dinner; for do you suppose that he, or Sardanapalus either,
+ever had twenty-four different kinds of pie at one dinner? Therein many
+a New England boy is greater than the Roman emperor or the Assyrian
+king, and these were among the most luxurious eaters of their day and
+generation. But something more is necessary to make good men than
+plenty to eat, as Heliogabalus no doubt found when his head was cut off.
+Cutting off the head was a mode the people had of expressing disapproval
+of their conspicuous men. Nowadays they elect them to a higher office,
+or give them a mission to some foreign country, if they do not do well
+where they are.
+
+For days and days before Thanksgiving the boy was kept at work evenings,
+pounding and paring and cutting up and mixing (not being allowed to
+taste much), until the world seemed to him to be made of fragrant
+spices, green fruit, raisins, and pastry,--a world that he was only yet
+allowed to enjoy through his nose. How filled the house was with the
+most delicious smells! The mince-pies that were made! If John had been
+shut in solid walls with them piled about him, he could n't have eaten
+his way out in four weeks. There were dainties enough cooked in those
+two weeks to have made the entire year luscious with good living, if
+they had been scattered along in it. But people were probably all the
+better for scrimping themselves a little in order to make this a great
+feast. And it was not by any means over in a day. There were weeks deep
+of chicken-pie and other pastry. The cold buttery was a cave of Aladdin,
+and it took a long time to excavate all its riches.
+
+Thanksgiving Day itself was a heavy dav, the hilarity of it being so
+subdued by going to meeting, and the universal wearing of the
+Sunday clothes, that the boy could n't see it. But if he felt little
+exhilaration, he ate a great deal. The next day was the real holiday.
+Then were the merry-making parties, and perhaps the skatings and
+sleigh-rides, for the freezing weather came before the governor's
+proclamation in many parts of New England. The night after Thanksgiving
+occurred, perhaps, the first real party that the boy had ever attended,
+with live girls in it, dressed so bewitchingly. And there he heard those
+philandering songs, and played those sweet games of forfeits, which put
+him quite beside himself, and kept him awake that night till the rooster
+crowed at the end of his first chicken-nap. What a new world did that
+party open to him! I think it likely that he saw there, and probably
+did not dare say ten words to, some tall, graceful girl, much older than
+himself, who seemed to him like a new order of being. He could see her
+face just as plainly in the darkness of his chamber. He wondered if she
+noticed how awkward he was, and how short his trousers-legs were. He
+blushed as he thought of his rather ill-fitting shoes; and determined,
+then and there, that he wouldn't be put off with a ribbon any longer,
+but would have a young man's necktie. It was somewhat painful, thinking
+the party over, but it was delicious, too. He did not think, probably,
+that he would die for that tall, handsome girl; he did not put it
+exactly in that way. But he rather resolved to live for her, which might
+in the end amount to the same thing. At least, he thought that nobody
+would live to speak twice disrespectfully of her in his presence.
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE
+
+What John said was, that he did n't care much for pumpkin-pie; but that
+was after he had eaten a whole one. It seemed to him then that mince
+would be better.
+
+The feeling of a boy towards pumpkin-pie has never been properly
+considered. There is an air of festivity about its approach in the fall.
+The boy is willing to help pare and cut up the pumpkin, and he watches
+with the greatest interest the stirring-up process and the pouring into
+the scalloped crust. When the sweet savor of the baking reaches his
+nostrils, he is filled with the most delightful anticipations. Why
+should he not be? He knows that for months to come the buttery will
+contain golden treasures, and that it will require only a slight
+ingenuity to get at them.
+
+The fact is, that the boy is as good in the buttery as in any part of
+farming. His elders say that the boy is always hungry; but that is a
+very coarse way to put it. He has only recently come into a world that
+is full of good things to eat, and there is, on the whole, a very
+short time in which to eat them; at least, he is told, among the first
+information he receives, that life is short. Life being brief, and pie
+and the like fleeting, he very soon decides upon an active campaign. It
+may be an old story to people who have been eating for forty or fifty
+years, but it is different with a beginner. He takes the thick and thin
+as it comes, as to pie, for instance. Some people do make them very
+thin. I knew a place where they were not thicker than the poor man's
+plaster; they were spread so thin upon the crust that they were better
+fitted to draw out hunger than to satisfy it. They used to be made up by
+the great oven-full and kept in the dry cellar, where they hardened and
+dried to a toughness you would hardly believe. This was a long time ago,
+and they make the pumpkin-pie in the country better now, or the race of
+boys would have been so discouraged that I think they would have stopped
+coming into the world.
+
+The truth is, that boys have always been so plenty that they are not
+half appreciated. We have shown that a farm could not get along without
+them, and yet their rights are seldom recognized. One of the most
+amusing things is their effort to acquire personal property. The boy
+has the care of the calves; they always need feeding, or shutting up,
+or letting out; when the boy wants to play, there are those calves to
+be looked after,--until he gets to hate the name of calf. But in
+consideration of his faithfulness, two of them are given to him. There
+is no doubt that they are his: he has the entire charge of them. When
+they get to be steers he spends all his holidays in breaking them in to
+a yoke. He gets them so broken in that they will run like a pair of deer
+all over the farm, turning the yoke, and kicking their heels, while he
+follows in full chase, shouting the ox language till he is red in the
+face. When the steers grow up to be cattle, a drover one day comes along
+and takes them away, and the boy is told that he can have another pair
+of calves; and so, with undiminished faith, he goes back and begins over
+again to make his fortune. He owns lambs and young colts in the same
+way, and makes just as much out of them.
+
+There are ways in which the farmer-boy can earn money, as by gathering
+the early chestnuts and taking them to the corner store, or by finding
+turkeys' eggs and selling them to his mother; and another way is to go
+without butter at the table--but the money thus made is for the heathen.
+John read in Dr. Livingstone that some of the tribes in Central Africa
+(which is represented by a blank spot in the atlas) use the butter to
+grease their hair, putting on pounds of it at a time; and he said he
+had rather eat his butter than have it put to that use, especially as it
+melted away so fast in that hot climate.
+
+Of course it was explained to John that the missionaries do not actually
+carry butter to Africa, and that they must usually go without it
+themselves there, it being almost impossible to make it good from the
+milk in the cocoanuts. And it was further explained to him that even
+if the heathen never received his butter or the money for it, it was an
+excellent thing for a boy to cultivate the habit of self-denial and of
+benevolence, and if the heathen never heard of him, he would be blessed
+for his generosity. This was all true.
+
+But John said that he was tired of supporting the heathen out of his
+butter, and he wished the rest of the family would also stop eating
+butter and save the money for missions; and he wanted to know where the
+other members of the family got their money to send to the heathen; and
+his mother said that he was about half right, and that self-denial was
+just as good for grown people as it was for little boys and girls.
+
+The boy is not always slow to take what he considers his rights.
+Speaking of those thin pumpkin-pies kept in the cellar cupboard. I used
+to know a boy, who afterwards grew to be a selectman, and brushed his
+hair straight up like General Jackson, and went to the legislature,
+where he always voted against every measure that was proposed, in the
+most honest manner, and got the reputation of being the “watch-dog of
+the treasury.” Rats in the cellar were nothing to be compared to this
+boy for destructiveness in pies. He used to go down whenever he could
+make an excuse, to get apples for the family, or draw a mug of cider
+for his dear old grandfather (who was a famous story-teller about the
+Revolutionary War, and would no doubt have been wounded in battle if he
+had not been as prudent as he was patriotic), and come upstairs with a
+tallow candle in one hand and the apples or cider in the other, looking
+as innocent and as unconscious as if he had never done anything in his
+life except deny himself butter for the sake of the heathen. And
+yet this boy would have buttoned under his jacket an entire round
+pumpkin-pie. And the pie was so well made and so dry that it was not
+injured in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more
+than if it had been inside of him instead of outside; and this boy would
+retire to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, being never
+suspected because he was not in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and
+he never appeared to have one about him. But he did something worse
+than this. When his mother saw that pie after pie departed, she told the
+family that she suspected the hired man; and the boy never said a
+word, which was the meanest kind of lying. That hired man was probably
+regarded with suspicion by the family to the end of his days, and if he
+had been accused of robbing, they would have believed him guilty.
+
+I shouldn't wonder if that selectman occasionally has remorse now about
+that pie; dreams, perhaps, that it is buttoned up under his jacket and
+sticking to him like a breastplate; that it lies upon his stomach like a
+round and red-hot nightmare, eating into his vitals. Perhaps not. It is
+difficult to say exactly what was the sin of stealing that kind of pie,
+especially if the one who stole it ate it. It could have been used for
+the game of pitching quoits, and a pair of them would have made very
+fair wheels for the dog-cart. And yet it is probably as wrong to steal
+a thin pie as a thick one; and it made no difference because it was easy
+to steal this sort. Easy stealing is no better than easy lying, where
+detection of the lie is difficult. The boy who steals his mother's pies
+has no right to be surprised when some other boy steals his watermelons.
+Stealing is like charity in one respect,--it is apt to begin at home.
+
+
+
+
+X. FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD
+
+If I were forced to be a boy, and a boy in the country,--the best kind
+of boy to be in the summer,--I would be about ten years of age. As soon
+as I got any older, I would quit it. The trouble with a boy is, that
+just as he begins to enjoy himself he is too old, and has to be set to
+doing something else. If a country boy were wise, he would stay at just
+that age when he could enjoy himself most, and have the least expected
+of him in the way of work.
+
+Of course the perfectly good boy will always prefer to work and to do
+“chores” for his father and errands for his mother and sisters, rather
+than enjoy himself in his own way. I never saw but one such boy. He
+lived in the town of Goshen,--not the place where the butter is made,
+but a much better Goshen than that. And I never saw him, but I heard of
+him; and being about the same age, as I supposed, I was taken once from
+Zoah, where I lived, to Goshen to see him. But he was dead. He had been
+dead almost a year, so that it was impossible to see him. He died of the
+most singular disease: it was from not eating green apples in the season
+of them. This boy, whose name was Solomon, before he died, would
+rather split up kindling-wood for his mother than go a-fishing,--the
+consequence was, that he was kept at splitting kindling-wood and such
+work most of the time, and grew a better and more useful boy day by day.
+Solomon would not disobey his parents and eat green apples,--not even
+when they were ripe enough to knock off with a stick, but he had such
+a longing for them, that he pined, and passed away. If he had eaten the
+green apples, he would have died of them, probably; so that his example
+is a difficult one to follow. In fact, a boy is a hard subject to get
+a moral from. All his little playmates who ate green apples came to
+Solomon's funeral, and were very sorry for what they had done.
+
+John was a very different boy from Solomon, not half so good, nor half
+so dead. He was a farmer's boy, as Solomon was, but he did not take so
+much interest in the farm. If John could have had his way, he would
+have discovered a cave full of diamonds, and lots of nail-kegs full of
+gold-pieces and Spanish dollars, with a pretty little girl living in
+the cave, and two beautifully caparisoned horses, upon which, taking the
+jewels and money, they would have ridden off together, he did not know
+where. John had got thus far in his studies, which were apparently
+arithmetic and geography, but were in reality the Arabian Nights, and
+other books of high and mighty adventure. He was a simple country-boy,
+and did not know much about the world as it is, but he had one of his
+own imagination, in which he lived a good deal. I daresay he found out
+soon enough what the world is, and he had a lesson or two when he was
+quite young, in two incidents, which I may as well relate.
+
+If you had seen John at this time, you might have thought he was only
+a shabbily dressed country lad, and you never would have guessed what
+beautiful thoughts he sometimes had as he went stubbing his toes along
+the dusty road, nor what a chivalrous little fellow he was. You would
+have seen a short boy, barefooted, with trousers at once too big and too
+short, held up perhaps by one suspender only, a checked cotton shirt,
+and a hat of braided palm-leaf, frayed at the edges and bulged up in
+the crown. It is impossible to keep a hat neat if you use it to catch
+bumblebees and whisk 'em; to bail the water from a leaky boat; to catch
+minnows in; to put over honey-bees' nests, and to transport pebbles,
+strawberries, and hens' eggs. John usually carried a sling in his hand,
+or a bow, or a limber stick, sharp at one end, from which he could sling
+apples a great distance. If he walked in the road, he walked in the
+middle of it, shuffling up the dust; or if he went elsewhere, he was
+likely to be running on the top of the fence or the stone wall, and
+chasing chipmunks.
+
+John knew the best place to dig sweet-flag in all the farm; it was in a
+meadow by the river, where the bobolinks sang so gayly. He never liked
+to hear the bobolink sing, however, for he said it always reminded him
+of the whetting of a scythe, and that reminded him of spreading hay; and
+if there was anything he hated, it was spreading hay after the mowers.
+“I guess you would n't like it yourself,” said John, “with the stubbs
+getting into your feet, and the hot sun, and the men getting ahead of
+you, all you could do.”
+
+Towards evening, once, John was coming along the road home with some
+stalks of the sweet-flag in his hand; there is a succulent pith in the
+end of the stalk which is very good to eat,--tender, and not so strong
+as the root; and John liked to pull it, and carry home what he did not
+eat on the way. As he was walking along he met a carriage, which stopped
+opposite to him; he also stopped and bowed, as country boys used to bow
+in John's day. A lady leaned from the carriage, and said:
+
+“What have you got, little boy?”
+
+She seemed to be the most beautiful woman John had ever seen; with light
+hair, dark, tender eyes, and the sweetest smile. There was that in her
+gracious mien and in her dress which reminded John of the beautiful
+castle ladies, with whom he was well acquainted in books. He felt that
+he knew her at once, and he also seemed to be a sort of young prince
+himself. I fancy he did n't look much like one. But of his own
+appearance he thought not at all, as he replied to the lady's question,
+without the least embarrassment:
+
+“It's sweet-flag stalk; would you like some?”
+
+“Indeed, I should like to taste it,” said the lady, with a most winning
+smile. “I used to be very fond of it when I was a little girl.”
+
+John was delighted that the lady should like sweet-flag, and that she
+was pleased to accept it from him. He thought himself that it was about
+the best thing to eat he knew. He handed up a large bunch of it. The
+lady took two or three stalks, and was about to return the rest, when
+John said:
+
+“Please keep it all, ma'am. I can get lots more.”
+
+“I know where it's ever so thick.”
+
+“Thank you, thank you,” said the lady; and as the carriage started, she
+reached out her hand to John. He did not understand the motion, until he
+saw a cent drop in the road at his feet. Instantly all his illusion
+and his pleasure vanished. Something like tears were in his eyes as he
+shouted:
+
+“I don't want your cent. I don't sell flag!”
+
+John was intensely mortified. “I suppose,” he said, “she thought I was a
+sort of beggar-boy. To think of selling flag!”
+
+At any rate, he walked away and left the cent in the road, a humiliated
+boy. The next day he told Jim Gates about it. Jim said he was green not
+to take the money; he'd go and look for it now, if he would tell him
+about where it dropped. And Jim did spend an hour poking about in the
+dirt, but he did not find the cent. Jim, however, had an idea; he said
+he was going to dig sweet-flag, and see if another carriage wouldn't
+come along.
+
+John's next rebuff and knowledge of the world was of another sort. He
+was again walking the road at twilight, when he was overtaken by a wagon
+with one seat, upon which were two pretty girls, and a young gentleman
+sat between them, driving. It was a merry party, and John could hear
+them laughing and singing as they approached him. The wagon stopped when
+it overtook him, and one of the sweet-faced girls leaned from the seat
+and said, quite seriously and pleasantly:
+
+“Little boy, how's your mar?”
+
+John was surprised and puzzled for a moment. He had never seen the young
+lady, but he thought that she perhaps knew his mother; at any rate, his
+instinct of politeness made him say:
+
+“She's pretty well, I thank you.”
+
+“Does she know you are out?”
+
+And thereupon all three in the wagon burst into a roar of laughter, and
+dashed on.
+
+It flashed upon John in a moment that he had been imposed on, and it
+hurt him dreadfully. His self-respect was injured somehow, and he felt
+as if his lovely, gentle mother had been insulted. He would like to have
+thrown a stone at the wagon, and in a rage he cried:
+
+“You're a nice....” but he could n't think of any hard, bitter words
+quick enough.
+
+Probably the young lady, who might have been almost any young lady,
+never knew what a cruel thing she had done.
+
+
+
+
+XI. HOME INVENTIONS
+
+The winter season is not all sliding downhill for the farmer-boy, by any
+means; yet he contrives to get as much fun out of it as from any part of
+the year. There is a difference in boys: some are always jolly, and some
+go scowling always through life as if they had a stone-bruise on each
+heel. I like a jolly boy.
+
+I used to know one who came round every morning to sell molasses candy,
+offering two sticks for a cent apiece; it was worth fifty cents a day to
+see his cheery face. That boy rose in the world. He is now the owner of
+a large town at the West. To be sure, there are no houses in it except
+his own; but there is a map of it, and roads and streets are laid out
+on it, with dwellings and churches and academies and a college and
+an opera-house, and you could scarcely tell it from Springfield or
+Hartford,--on paper. He and all his family have the fever and ague,
+and shake worse than the people at Lebanon; but they do not mind it; it
+makes them lively, in fact. Ed May is just as jolly as he used to be.
+He calls his town Mayopolis, and expects to be mayor of it; his wife,
+however, calls the town Maybe.
+
+The farmer-boy likes to have winter come for one thing, because it
+freezes up the ground so that he can't dig in it; and it is covered
+with snow so that there is no picking up stones, nor driving the cows to
+pasture. He would have a very easy time if it were not for the getting
+up before daylight to build the fires and do the “chores.” Nature
+intended the long winter nights for the farmer-boy to sleep; but in my
+day he was expected to open his sleepy eyes when the cock crew, get out
+of the warm bed and light a candle, struggle into his cold pantaloons,
+and pull on boots in which the thermometer would have gone down to zero,
+rake open the coals on the hearth and start the morning fire, and then
+go to the barn to “fodder.” The frost was thick on the kitchen windows,
+the snow was drifted against the door, and the journey to the barn, in
+the pale light of dawn, over the creaking snow, was like an exile's trip
+to Siberia. The boy was not half awake when he stumbled into the cold
+barn, and was greeted by the lowing and bleating and neighing of cattle
+waiting for their breakfast. How their breath steamed up from the
+mangers, and hung in frosty spears from their noses. Through the
+great lofts above the hay, where the swallows nested, the winter wind
+whistled, and the snow sifted. Those old barns were well ventilated.
+
+I used to spend much valuable time in planning a barn that should be
+tight and warm, with a fire in it, if necessary, in order to keep the
+temperature somewhere near the freezing-point. I could n't see how the
+cattle could live in a place where a lively boy, full of young blood,
+would freeze to death in a short time if he did not swing his arms and
+slap his hands, and jump about like a goat. I thought I would have a
+sort of perpetual manger that should shake down the hay when it was
+wanted, and a self-acting machine that should cut up the turnips and
+pass them into the mangers, and water always flowing for the cattle and
+horses to drink. With these simple arrangements I could lie in bed,
+and know that the “chores” were doing themselves. It would also be
+necessary, in order that I should not be disturbed, that the crow should
+be taken out of the roosters, but I could think of no process to do it.
+It seems to me that the hen-breeders, if they know as much as they say
+they do, might raise a breed of crowless roosters for the benefit of
+boys, quiet neighborhoods, and sleepy families.
+
+There was another notion that I had about kindling the kitchen fire,
+that I never carried out. It was to have a spring at the head of my
+bed, connecting with a wire, which should run to a torpedo which I would
+plant over night in the ashes of the fireplace. By touching the spring
+I could explode the torpedo, which would scatter the ashes and cover
+the live coals, and at the same time shake down the sticks of wood which
+were standing by the side of the ashes in the chimney, and the fire
+would kindle itself. This ingenious plan was frowned on by the whole
+family, who said they did not want to be waked up every morning by an
+explosion. And yet they expected me to wake up without an explosion! A
+boy's plans for making life agreeable are hardly ever heeded.
+
+I never knew a boy farmer who was not eager to go to the district school
+in the winter. There is such a chance for learning, that he must be a
+dull boy who does not come out in the spring a fair skater, an accurate
+snow-baller, and an accomplished slider-down-hill, with or without a
+board, on his seat, on his stomach, or on his feet. Take a moderate
+hill, with a foot-slide down it worn to icy smoothness, and a “go-round”
+ of boys on it, and there is nothing like it for whittling away
+boot-leather. The boy is the shoemaker's friend. An active lad can wear
+down a pair of cowhide soles in a week so that the ice will scrape his
+toes. Sledding or coasting is also slow fun compared to the “bareback”
+ sliding down a steep hill over a hard, glistening crust. It is not only
+dangerous, but it is destructive to jacket and pantaloons to a degree to
+make a tailor laugh. If any other animal wore out his skin as fast as a
+schoolboy wears out his clothes in winter, it would need a new one once
+a month. In a country district-school patches were not by any means a
+sign of poverty, but of the boy's courage and adventurous disposition.
+Our elders used to threaten to dress us in leather and put sheet-iron
+seats in our trousers. The boy said that he wore out his trousers on
+the hard seats in the schoolhouse ciphering hard sums. For that
+extraordinary statement he received two castigations,--one at home, that
+was mild, and one from the schoolmaster, who was careful to lay the rod
+upon the boy's sliding-place, punishing him, as he jocosely called it,
+on a sliding scale, according to the thinness of his pantaloons.
+
+What I liked best at school, however, was the study of history,--early
+history,--the Indian wars. We studied it mostly at noontime, and we had
+it illustrated as the children nowadays have “object-lessons,” though
+our object was not so much to have lessons as it was to revive real
+history.
+
+Back of the schoolhouse rose a round hill, upon which, tradition said,
+had stood in colonial times a block-house, built by the settlers for
+defense against the Indians. For the Indians had the idea that the
+whites were not settled enough, and used to come nights to settle--them
+with a tomahawk. It was called Fort Hill. It was very steep on each
+side, and the river ran close by. It was a charming place in summer,
+where one could find laurel, and checkerberries, and sassafras roots,
+and sit in the cool breeze, looking at the mountains across the river,
+and listening to the murmur of the Deerfield. The Methodists built a
+meeting-house there afterwards, but the hill was so slippery in winter
+that the aged could not climb it and the wind raged so fiercely that it
+blew nearly all the young Methodists away (many of whom were afterwards
+heard of in the West), and finally the meeting-house itself came down
+into the valley, and grew a steeple, and enjoyed itself ever afterwards.
+It used to be a notion in New England that a meeting-house ought to
+stand as near heaven as possible.
+
+The boys at our school divided themselves into two parties: one was the
+Early Settlers and the other the Pequots, the latter the most numerous.
+The Early Settlers built a snow fort on the hill, and a strong fortress
+it was, constructed of snowballs, rolled up to a vast size (larger than
+the cyclopean blocks of stone which form the ancient Etruscan walls in
+Italy), piled one upon another, and the whole cemented by pouring on
+water which froze and made the walls solid. The Pequots helped the
+whites build it. It had a covered way under the snow, through which only
+could it be entered, and it had bastions and towers and openings to
+fire from, and a great many other things for which there are no names in
+military books. And it had a glacis and a ditch outside.
+
+When it was completed, the Early Settlers, leaving the women in the
+schoolhouse, a prey to the Indians, used to retire into it, and await
+the attack of the Pequots. There was only a handful of the garrison,
+while the Indians were many, and also barbarous. It was agreed that they
+should be barbarous. And it was in this light that the great question
+was settled whether a boy might snowball with balls that he had soaked
+over night in water and let freeze. They were as hard as cobble-stones,
+and if a boy should be hit in the head by one of them, he could not tell
+whether he was a Pequot or an Early Settler. It was considered as
+unfair to use these ice-balls in open fight, as it is to use poisoned
+ammunition in real war. But as the whites were protected by the fort,
+and the Indians were treacherous by nature, it was decided that the
+latter might use the hard missiles.
+
+The Pequots used to come swarming up the hill, with hideous war-whoops,
+attacking the fort on all sides with great noise and a shower of balls.
+The garrison replied with yells of defiance and well-directed shots,
+hurling back the invaders when they attempted to scale the walls.
+The Settlers had the advantage of position, but they were sometimes
+overpowered by numbers, and would often have had to surrender but for
+the ringing of the school-bell. The Pequots were in great fear of the
+school-bell.
+
+I do not remember that the whites ever hauled down their flag and
+surrendered voluntarily; but once or twice the fort was carried by
+storm and the garrison were massacred to a boy, and thrown out of the
+fortress, having been first scalped. To take a boy's cap was to scalp
+him, and after that he was dead, if he played fair. There were a great
+many hard hits given and taken, but always cheerfully, for it was in
+the cause of our early history. The history of Greece and Rome was stuff
+compared to this. And we had many boys in our school who could imitate
+the Indian war whoop enough better than they could scan arma, virumque
+cano.
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE LONELY FARMHOUSE
+
+The winter evenings of the farmer-boy in New England used not to be so
+gay as to tire him of the pleasures of life before he became of age. A
+remote farmhouse, standing a little off the road, banked up with sawdust
+and earth to keep the frost out of the cellar, blockaded with snow,
+and flying a blue flag of smoke from its chimney, looks like a besieged
+fort. On cold and stormy winter nights, to the traveler wearily dragging
+along in his creaking sleigh, the light from its windows suggests a
+house of refuge and the cheer of a blazing fire. But it is no less a
+fort, into which the family retire when the New England winter on the
+hills really sets in.
+
+The boy is an important part of the garrison. He is not only one of the
+best means of communicating with the outer world, but he furnishes half
+the entertainment and takes two thirds of the scolding of the family
+circle. A farm would come to grief without a boy-on it, but it is
+impossible to think of a farmhouse without a boy in it.
+
+“That boy” brings life into the house; his tracks are to be seen
+everywhere; he leaves all the doors open; he has n't half filled
+the wood-box; he makes noise enough to wake the dead; or he is in a
+brown-study by the fire and cannot be stirred, or he has fastened a grip
+into some Crusoe book which cannot easily be shaken off. I suppose that
+the farmer-boy's evenings are not now what they used to be; that he has
+more books, and less to do, and is not half so good a boy as formerly,
+when he used to think the almanac was pretty lively reading, and the
+comic almanac, if he could get hold of that, was a supreme delight.
+
+Of course he had the evenings to himself, after he had done the “chores”
+ at the barn, brought in the wood and piled it high in the box, ready to
+be heaped upon the great open fire. It was nearly dark when he came from
+school (with its continuation of snowballing and sliding), and he
+always had an agreeable time stumbling and fumbling around in barn and
+wood-house, in the waning light.
+
+John used to say that he supposed nobody would do his “chores” if he
+did not get home till midnight; and he was never contradicted. Whatever
+happened to him, and whatever length of days or sort of weather was
+produced by the almanac, the cardinal rule was that he should be at home
+before dark.
+
+John used to imagine what people did in the dark ages, and wonder
+sometimes whether he was n't still in them.
+
+Of course, John had nothing to do all the evening, after his
+“chores,”--except little things. While he drew his chair up to the table
+in order to get the full radiance of the tallow candle on his slate
+or his book, the women of the house also sat by the table knitting and
+sewing. The head of the house sat in his chair, tipped back against the
+chimney; the hired man was in danger of burning his boots in the fire.
+John might be deep in the excitement of a bear story, or be hard at
+writing a “composition” on his greasy slate; but whatever he was doing,
+he was the only one who could always be interrupted. It was he who must
+snuff the candles, and put on a stick of wood, and toast the cheese,
+and turn the apples, and crack the nuts. He knew where the fox-and-geese
+board was, and he could find the twelve-men-Morris. Considering that
+he was expected to go to bed at eight o'clock, one would say that the
+opportunity for study was not great, and that his reading was rather
+interrupted. There seemed to be always something for him to do, even
+when all the rest of the family came as near being idle as is ever
+possible in a New England household.
+
+No wonder that John was not sleepy at eight o'clock; he had been flying
+about while the others had been yawning before the fire. He would like
+to sit up just to see how much more solemn and stupid it would become as
+the night went on; he wanted to tinker his skates, to mend his sled, to
+finish that chapter. Why should he go away from that bright blaze, and
+the company that sat in its radiance, to the cold and solitude of his
+chamber? Why did n't the people who were sleepy go to bed?
+
+How lonesome the old house was; how cold it was, away from that great
+central fire in the heart of it; how its timbers creaked as if in the
+contracting pinch of the frost; what a rattling there was of windows,
+what a concerted attack upon the clapboards; how the floors squeaked,
+and what gusts from round corners came to snatch the feeble flame of
+the candle from the boy's hand. How he shivered, as he paused at the
+staircase window to look out upon the great fields of snow, upon the
+stripped forest, through which he could hear the wind raving in a kind
+of fury, and up at the black flying clouds, amid which the young moon
+was dashing and driven on like a frail shallop at sea. And his teeth
+chattered more than ever when he got into the icy sheets, and drew
+himself up into a ball in his flannel nightgown, like a fox in his hole.
+
+For a little time he could hear the noises downstairs, and an occasional
+laugh; he could guess that now they were having cider, and now apples
+were going round; and he could feel the wind tugging at the house, even
+sometimes shaking the bed. But this did not last long. He soon went away
+into a country he always delighted to be in: a calm place where the
+wind never blew, and no one dictated the time of going to bed to any one
+else. I like to think of him sleeping there, in such rude surroundings,
+ingenious, innocent, mischievous, with no thought of the buffeting he is
+to get from a world that has a good many worse places for a boy than
+the hearth of an old farmhouse, and the sweet, though undemonstrative,
+affection of its family life.
+
+But there were other evenings in the boy's life, that were different
+from these at home, and one of them he will never forget. It opened
+a new world to John, and set him into a great flutter. It produced a
+revolution in his mind in regard to neckties; it made him wonder if
+greased boots were quite the thing compared with blacked boots; and he
+wished he had a long looking-glass, so that he could see, as he walked
+away from it, what was the effect of round patches on the portion of his
+trousers he could not see, except in a mirror; and if patches were
+quite stylish, even on everyday trousers. And he began to be very much
+troubled about the parting of his hair, and how to find out on which
+side was the natural part.
+
+The evening to which I refer was that of John's first party. He knew the
+girls at school, and he was interested in some of them with a different
+interest from that he took in the boys. He never wanted to “take it
+out” with one of them, for an insult, in a stand-up fight, and he
+instinctively softened a boy's natural rudeness when he was with them.
+He would help a timid little girl to stand erect and slide; he would
+draw her on his sled, till his hands were stiff with cold, without a
+murmur; he would generously give her red apples into which he longed to
+set his own sharp teeth; and he would cut in two his lead-pencil for
+a girl, when he would not for a boy. Had he not some of the beautiful
+auburn tresses of Cynthia Rudd in his skate, spruce-gum, and wintergreen
+box at home? And yet the grand sentiment of life was little awakened
+in John. He liked best to be with boys, and their rough play suited
+him better than the amusements of the shrinking, fluttering, timid, and
+sensitive little girls. John had not learned then that a spider-web is
+stronger than a cable; or that a pretty little girl could turn him round
+her finger a great deal easier than a big bully of a boy could make him
+cry “enough.”
+
+John had indeed been at spelling-schools, and had accomplished the feat
+of “going home with a girl” afterwards; and he had been growing into the
+habit of looking around in meeting on Sunday, and noticing how Cynthia
+was dressed, and not enjoying the service quite as much if Cynthia was
+absent as when she was present. But there was very little sentiment in
+all this, and nothing whatever to make John blush at hearing her name.
+
+But now John was invited to a regular party. There was the invitation,
+in a three-cornered billet, sealed with a transparent wafer: “Miss C.
+Rudd requests the pleasure of the company of,” etc., all in blue ink,
+and the finest kind of pin-scratching writing. What a precious document
+it was to John! It even exhaled a faint sort of perfume, whether of
+lavender or caraway-seed he could not tell. He read it over a hundred
+times, and showed it confidentially to his favorite cousin, who had
+beaux of her own and had even “sat up” with them in the parlor. And from
+this sympathetic cousin John got advice as to what he should wear and
+how he should conduct himself at the party.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. JOHN'S FIRST PARTY
+
+It turned out that John did not go after all to Cynthia Rudd's party,
+having broken through the ice on the river when he was skating that day,
+and, as the boy who pulled him out said, “come within an inch of his
+life.” But he took care not to tumble into anything that should keep
+him from the next party, which was given with due formality by Melinda
+Mayhew.
+
+John had been many a time to the house of Deacon Mayhew, and never
+with any hesitation, even if he knew that both the deacon's
+daughters--Melinda and Sophronia were at home. The only fear he had felt
+was of the deacon's big dog, who always surlily watched him as he came
+up the tan-bark walk, and made a rush at him if he showed the least sign
+of wavering. But upon the night of the party his courage vanished, and
+he thought he would rather face all the dogs in town than knock at the
+front door.
+
+The parlor was lighted up, and as John stood on the broad flagging
+before the front door, by the lilac-bush, he could hear the sound of
+voices--girls' voices--which set his heart in a flutter. He could face
+the whole district school of girls without flinching,--he didn't mind
+'em in the meeting-house in their Sunday best; but he began to be
+conscious that now he was passing to a new sphere, where the girls are
+supreme and superior, and he began to feel for the first time that he
+was an awkward boy. The girl takes to society as naturally as a duckling
+does to the placid pond, but with a semblance of shy timidity; the boy
+plunges in with a great splash, and hides his shy awkwardness in noise
+and commotion.
+
+When John entered, the company had nearly all come. He knew them every
+one, and yet there was something about them strange and unfamiliar. They
+were all a little afraid of each other, as people are apt to be when
+they are well dressed and met together for social purposes in the
+country. To be at a real party was a novel thing for most of them,
+and put a constraint upon them which they could not at once overcome.
+Perhaps it was because they were in the awful parlor,--that carpeted
+room of haircloth furniture, which was so seldom opened. Upon the wall
+hung two certificates framed in black,--one certifying that, by the
+payment of fifty dollars, Deacon Mayhew was a life member of the
+American Tract Society, and the other that, by a like outlay of bread
+cast upon the waters, his wife was a life member of the A. B. C. F. M.,
+a portion of the alphabet which has an awful significance to all New
+England childhood. These certificates are a sort of receipt in full for
+charity, and are a constant and consoling reminder to the farmer that he
+has discharged his religious duties.
+
+There was a fire on the broad hearth, and that, with the tallow candles
+on the mantelpiece, made quite an illumination in the room, and enabled
+the boys, who were mostly on one side of the room, to see the girls, who
+were on the other, quite plainly. How sweet and demure the girls looked,
+to be sure! Every boy was thinking if his hair was slick, and feeling
+the full embarrassment of his entrance into fashionable life. It was
+queer that these children, who were so free everywhere else, should
+be so constrained now, and not know what to do with themselves. The
+shooting of a spark out upon the carpet was a great relief, and was
+accompanied by a deal of scrambling to throw it back into the fire, and
+caused much giggling. It was only gradually that the formality was at
+all broken, and the young people got together and found their tongues.
+
+John at length found himself with Cynthia Rudd, to his great delight and
+considerable embarrassment, for Cynthia, who was older than John, never
+looked so pretty. To his surprise he had nothing to say to her. They had
+always found plenty to talk about before--but now nothing that he could
+think of seemed worth saying at a party.
+
+“It is a pleasant evening,” said John.
+
+“It is quite so,” replied Cynthia.
+
+“Did you come in a cutter?” asked John anxiously.
+
+“No; I walked on the crust, and it was perfectly lovely walking,” said
+Cynthia, in a burst of confidence.
+
+“Was it slippery?” continued John.
+
+“Not very.”
+
+John hoped it would be slippery--very--when he walked home with
+Cynthia, as he determined to do, but he did not dare to say so, and the
+conversation ran aground again. John thought about his dog and his sled
+and his yoke of steers, but he didn't see any way to bring them into
+conversation. Had she read the “Swiss Family Robinson”? Only a little
+ways. John said it was splendid, and he would lend it to her, for which
+she thanked him, and said, with such a sweet expression, she should be
+so glad to have it from him. That was encouraging.
+
+And then John asked Cynthia if she had seen Sally Hawkes since the
+husking at their house, when Sally found so many red ears; and didn't
+she think she was a real pretty girl.
+
+“Yes, she was right pretty;” and Cynthia guessed that Sally knew it
+pretty well. But did John like the color of her eyes?
+
+No; John didn't like the color of her eyes exactly.
+
+“Her mouth would be well enough if she did n't laugh so much and show
+her teeth.”
+
+John said her mouth was her worst feature.
+
+“Oh, no,” said Cynthia warmly; “her mouth is better than her nose.”
+
+John did n't know but it was better than her nose, and he should like
+her looks better if her hair was n't so dreadful black.
+
+But Cynthia, who could afford to be generous now, said she liked black
+hair, and she wished hers was dark. Whereupon John protested that he
+liked light hair--auburn hair--of all things.
+
+And Cynthia said that Sally was a dear, good girl, and she did n't
+believe one word of the story that she only really found one red ear at
+the husking that night, and hid that and kept pulling it out as if it
+were a new one.
+
+And so the conversation, once started, went on as briskly as
+possible about the paring-bee, and the spelling-school, and the new
+singing-master who was coming, and how Jack Thompson had gone to
+Northampton to be a clerk in a store, and how Elvira Reddington, in
+the geography class at school, was asked what was the capital of
+Massachusetts, and had answered “Northampton,” and all the school
+laughed. John enjoyed the conversation amazingly, and he half wished
+that he and Cynthia were the whole of the party.
+
+But the party had meantime got into operation, and the formality was
+broken up when the boys and girls had ventured out of the parlor into
+the more comfortable living-room, with its easy-chairs and everyday
+things, and even gone so far as to penetrate the kitchen in their
+frolic. As soon as they forgot they were a party, they began to enjoy
+themselves.
+
+But the real pleasure only began with the games. The party was nothing
+without the games, and, indeed, it was made for the games. Very likely
+it was one of the timid girls who proposed to play something, and
+when the ice was once broken, the whole company went into the business
+enthusiastically. There was no dancing. We should hope not. Not in the
+deacon's house; not with the deacon's daughters, nor anywhere in this
+good Puritanic society. Dancing was a sin in itself, and no one could
+tell what it would lead to. But there was no reason why the boys and
+girls shouldn't come together and kiss each other during a whole evening
+occasionally. Kissing was a sign of peace, and was not at all like
+taking hold of hands and skipping about to the scraping of a wicked
+fiddle.
+
+In the games there was a great deal of clasping hands, of going round in
+a circle, of passing under each other's elevated arms, of singing about
+my true love, and the end was kisses distributed with more or less
+partiality, according to the rules of the play; but, thank Heaven, there
+was no fiddler. John liked it all, and was quite brave about paying all
+the forfeits imposed on him, even to the kissing all the girls in the
+room; but he thought he could have amended that by kissing a few of them
+a good many times instead of kissing them all once.
+
+But John was destined to have a damper put upon his enjoyment. They were
+playing a most fascinating game, in which they all stand in a circle and
+sing a philandering song, except one who is in the center of the ring,
+and holds a cushion. At a certain word in the song, the one in
+the center throws the cushion at the feet of some one in the ring,
+indicating thereby the choice of a “mate” and then the two sweetly kneel
+upon the cushion, like two meek angels, and--and so forth. Then the
+chosen one takes the cushion and the delightful play goes on. It is very
+easy, as it will be seen, to learn how to play it. Cynthia was holding
+the cushion, and at the fatal word she threw it down, not before John,
+but in front of Ephraim Leggett. And they two kneeled, and so forth.
+John was astounded. He had never conceived of such perfidy in the female
+heart. He felt like wiping Ephraim off the face of the earth, only
+Ephraim was older and bigger than he. When it came his turn at
+length,--thanks to a plain little girl for whose admiration he did n't
+care a straw,--he threw the cushion down before Melinda Mayhew with
+all the devotion he could muster, and a dagger look at Cynthia. And
+Cynthia's perfidious smile only enraged him the more. John felt wronged,
+and worked himself up to pass a wretched evening.
+
+When supper came, he never went near Cynthia, and busied himself in
+carrying different kinds of pie and cake, and red apples and cider,
+to the girls he liked the least. He shunned Cynthia, and when he was
+accidentally near her, and she asked him if he would get her a glass of
+cider, he rudely told her--like a goose as he was--that she had better
+ask Ephraim. That seemed to him very smart; but he got more and more
+miserable, and began to feel that he was making himself ridiculous.
+
+Girls have a great deal more good sense in such matters than boys.
+Cynthia went to John, at length, and asked him simply what the matter
+was. John blushed, and said that nothing was the matter. Cynthia said
+that it wouldn't do for two people always to be together at a party; and
+so they made up, and John obtained permission to “see” Cynthia home.
+
+It was after half-past nine when the great festivities at the Deacon's
+broke up, and John walked home with Cynthia over the shining crust
+and under the stars. It was mostly a silent walk, for this was also an
+occasion when it is difficult to find anything fit to say. And John was
+thinking all the way how he should bid Cynthia good-night; whether
+it would do and whether it wouldn't do, this not being a game, and
+no forfeits attaching to it. When they reached the gate, there was
+an awkward little pause. John said the stars were uncommonly bright.
+Cynthia did not deny it, but waited a minute and then turned abruptly
+away, with “Good-night, John!”
+
+“Good-night, Cynthia!”
+
+And the party was over, and Cynthia was gone, and John went home in a
+kind of dissatisfaction with himself.
+
+It was long before he could go to sleep for thinking of the new world
+opened to him, and imagining how he would act under a hundred different
+circumstances, and what he would say, and what Cynthia would say; but a
+dream at length came, and led him away to a great city and a brilliant
+house; and while he was there, he heard a loud rapping on the under
+floor, and saw that it was daylight.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. THE SUGAR CAMP
+
+I think there is no part of farming the boy enjoys more than the making
+of maple sugar; it is better than “blackberrying,” and nearly as good as
+fishing. And one reason he likes this work is, that somebody else does
+the most of it. It is a sort of work in which he can appear to be very
+active, and yet not do much.
+
+And it exactly suits the temperament of a real boy to be very busy about
+nothing. If the power, for instance, that is expended in play by a
+boy between the ages of eight and fourteen could be applied to some
+industry, we should see wonderful results. But a boy is like a
+galvanic battery that is not in connection with anything; he generates
+electricity and plays it off into the air with the most reckless
+prodigality. And I, for one, would n't have it otherwise. It is as much
+a boy's business to play off his energies into space as it is for a
+flower to blow, or a catbird to sing snatches of the tunes of all the
+other birds.
+
+In my day maple-sugar-making used to be something between picnicking and
+being shipwrecked on a fertile island, where one should save from the
+wreck tubs and augers, and great kettles and pork, and hen's eggs and
+rye-and-indian bread, and begin at once to lead the sweetest life in the
+world. I am told that it is something different nowadays, and that there
+is more desire to save the sap, and make good, pure sugar, and sell
+it for a large price, than there used to be, and that the old fun and
+picturesqueness of the business are pretty much gone. I am told that it
+is the custom to carefully collect the sap and bring it to the house,
+where there are built brick arches, over which it is evaporated in
+shallow pans, and that pains is taken to keep the leaves, sticks, and
+ashes and coals out of it, and that the sugar is clarified; and that, in
+short, it is a money-making business, in which there is very little fun,
+and that the boy is not allowed to dip his paddle into the kettle of
+boiling sugar and lick off the delicious sirup. The prohibition may
+improve the sugar, but it is cruel to the boy.
+
+As I remember the New England boy (and I am very intimate with one), he
+used to be on the qui vive in the spring for the sap to begin running.
+I think he discovered it as soon as anybody. Perhaps he knew it by a
+feeling of something starting in his own veins,--a sort of spring stir
+in his legs and arms, which tempted him to stand on his head, or throw
+a handspring, if he could find a spot of ground from which the snow
+had melted. The sap stirs early in the legs of a country-boy, and shows
+itself in uneasiness in the toes, which get tired of boots, and want
+to come out and touch the soil just as soon as the sun has warmed it
+a little. The country-boy goes barefoot just as naturally as the trees
+burst their buds, which were packed and varnished over in the fall to
+keep the water and the frost out. Perhaps the boy has been out digging
+into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is pretty sure
+to announce the discovery as he comes running into the house in a great
+state of excitement--as if he had heard a hen cackle in the barn--with
+“Sap's runnin'!”
+
+And then, indeed, the stir and excitement begin. The sap-buckets, which
+have been stored in the garret over the wood-house, and which the boy
+has occasionally climbed up to look at with another boy, for they are
+full of sweet suggestions of the annual spring frolic,--the sap-buckets
+are brought down and set out on the south side of the house and scalded.
+The snow is still a foot or two deep in the woods, and the ox-sled is
+got out to make a road to the sugar camp, and the campaign begins. The
+boy is everywhere present, superintending everything, asking questions,
+and filled with a desire to help the excitement.
+
+It is a great day when the cart is loaded with the buckets and the
+procession starts into the woods. The sun shines almost unobstructedly
+into the forest, for there are only naked branches to bar it; the snow
+is soft and beginning to sink down, leaving the young bushes spindling
+up everywhere; the snowbirds are twittering about, and the noise of
+shouting and of the blows of the axe echoes far and wide. This is
+spring, and the boy can scarcely contain his delight that his out-door
+life is about to begin again.
+
+In the first place, the men go about and tap the trees, drive in the
+spouts, and hang the buckets under. The boy watches all these operations
+with the greatest interest. He wishes that sometime, when a hole is
+bored in a tree, the sap would spout out in a stream as it does when
+a cider-barrel is tapped; but it never does, it only drops, sometimes
+almost in a stream, but on the whole slowly, and the boy learns that the
+sweet things of the world have to be patiently waited for, and do not
+usually come otherwise than drop by drop.
+
+Then the camp is to be cleared of snow. The shanty is re-covered with
+boughs. In front of it two enormous logs are rolled nearly together, and
+a fire is built between them. Forked sticks are set at each end, and
+a long pole is laid on them, and on this are hung the great caldron
+kettles. The huge hogsheads are turned right side up, and cleaned out to
+receive the sap that is gathered. And now, if there is a good “sap run,”
+ the establishment is under full headway.
+
+The great fire that is kindled up is never let out, night or day, as
+long as the season lasts. Somebody is always cutting wood to feed it;
+somebody is busy most of the time gathering in the sap; somebody is
+required to watch the kettles that they do not boil over, and to fill
+them. It is not the boy, however; he is too busy with things in general
+to be of any use in details. He has his own little sap-yoke and
+small pails, with which he gathers the sweet liquid. He has a little
+boiling-place of his own, with small logs and a tiny kettle. In
+the great kettles the boiling goes on slowly, and the liquid, as it
+thickens, is dipped from one to another, until in the end kettle it is
+reduced to sirup, and is taken out to cool and settle, until enough is
+made to “sugar off.” To “sugar off” is to boil the sirup until it is
+thick enough to crystallize into sugar. This is the grand event, and is
+done only once in two or three days.
+
+But the boy's desire is to “sugar off” perpetually. He boils his kettle
+down as rapidly as possible; he is not particular about chips, scum, or
+ashes; he is apt to burn his sugar; but if he can get enough to make a
+little wax on the snow, or to scrape from the bottom of the kettle with
+his wooden paddle, he is happy. A good deal is wasted on his hands, and
+the outside of his face, and on his clothes, but he does not care; he is
+not stingy.
+
+To watch the operations of the big fire gives him constant pleasure.
+Sometimes he is left to watch the boiling kettles, with a piece of pork
+tied on the end of a stick, which he dips into the boiling mass when it
+threatens to go over. He is constantly tasting of it, however, to see
+if it is not almost sirup. He has a long round stick, whittled smooth at
+one end, which he uses for this purpose, at the constant risk of burning
+his tongue. The smoke blows in his face; he is grimy with ashes; he is
+altogether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, and sweetness, that his own
+mother would n't know him.
+
+He likes to boil eggs in the hot sap with the hired man; he likes to
+roast potatoes in the ashes, and he would live in the camp day and night
+if he were permitted. Some of the hired men sleep in the bough shanty
+and keep the fire blazing all night. To sleep there with them, and awake
+in the night and hear the wind in the trees, and see the sparks fly up
+to the sky, is a perfect realization of all the stories of adventures
+he has ever read. He tells the other boys afterwards that he heard
+something in the night that sounded very much like a bear. The hired man
+says that he was very much scared by the hooting of an owl.
+
+The great occasions for the boy, though, are the times of
+“sugaring-off.” Sometimes this used to be done in the evening, and
+it was made the excuse for a frolic in the camp. The neighbors were
+invited; sometimes even the pretty girls from the village, who filled
+all the woods with their sweet voices and merry laughter and little
+affectations of fright. The white snow still lies on all the ground
+except the warm spot about the camp. The tree branches all show
+distinctly in the light of the fire, which sends its ruddy glare far
+into the darkness, and lights up the bough shanty, the hogsheads, the
+buckets on the trees, and the group about the boiling kettles, until the
+scene is like something taken out of a fairy play. If Rembrandt could
+have seen a sugar party in a New England wood, he would have made out
+of its strong contrasts of light and shade one of the finest pictures
+in the world. But Rembrandt was not born in Massachusetts; people hardly
+ever do know where to be born until it is too late. Being born in the
+right place is a thing that has been very much neglected.
+
+At these sugar parties every one was expected to eat as much sugar as
+possible; and those who are practiced in it can eat a great deal. It is
+a peculiarity about eating warm maple sugar, that though you may eat so
+much of it one day as to be sick and loathe the thought of it, you will
+want it the next day more than ever. At the “sugaring-off” they used
+to pour the hot sugar upon the snow, where it congealed, without
+crystallizing, into a sort of wax, which I do suppose is the most
+delicious substance that was ever invented. And it takes a great while
+to eat it. If one should close his teeth firmly on a ball of it, he
+would be unable to open his mouth until it dissolved. The sensation
+while it is melting is very pleasant, but one cannot converse.
+
+The boy used to make a big lump of it and give it to the dog, who
+seized it with great avidity, and closed his jaws on it, as dogs will on
+anything. It was funny the next moment to see the expression of perfect
+surprise on the dog's face when he found that he could not open his
+jaws. He shook his head; he sat down in despair; he ran round in a
+circle; he dashed into the woods and back again. He did everything
+except climb a tree, and howl. It would have been such a relief to him
+if he could have howled. But that was the one thing he could not do.
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND
+
+It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or
+a missionary, or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is everything in
+the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy,
+and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what
+the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most
+fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all
+the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer in literature and in
+the world, a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the soil and
+the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming,
+that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the
+desire of adventure. And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at
+all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world. In the good old days,
+I am told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors; the
+countryboys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and
+then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in foreign ports. John
+used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory-tree that a little
+detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the steep and
+lofty pasture behind his house. He was sent to make war on the bushes
+that constantly encroached upon the pastureland; but John had no
+hostility to any growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied
+him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree-sprouts, he
+was wont to retire into his favorite post of observation and meditation.
+Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying stem to which he clung was the
+mast of a ship; that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves
+of the sea; and that the wind which moaned over the woods and murmured
+in the leaves, and now and then sent him a wide circuit in the air,
+as if he had been a blackbird on the tip-top of a spruce, was an
+ocean gale. What life, and action, and heroism there was to him in the
+multitudinous roar of the forest, and what an eternity of existence in
+the monologue of the river, which brawled far, far below him over its
+wide stony bed! How the river sparkled and danced and went on, now in a
+smooth amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with
+that continuous busy song! John never knew that noise to cease, and he
+doubted not, if he stayed here a thousand years, that same loud murmur
+would fill the air.
+
+On it went, under the wide spans of the old wooden, covered bridge,
+swirling around the great rocks on which the piers stood, spreading away
+below in shallows, and taking the shadows of a row of maples that lined
+the green shore. Save this roar, no sound reached him, except now and
+then the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the muffled far-off voices
+of some chance passers on the road. Seen from this high perch, the
+familiar village, sending its brown roofs and white spires up through
+the green foliage, had a strange aspect, and was like some town in a
+book, say a village nestled in the Swiss mountains, or something in
+Bohemia. And there, beyond the purple hills of Bozrah, and not so far as
+the stony pastures of Zoah, whither John had helped drive the colts and
+young stock in the spring, might be, perhaps, Jerusalem itself. John had
+himself once been to the land of Canaan with his grandfather, when he
+was a very small boy; and he had once seen an actual, no-mistake Jew,
+a mysterious person, with uncut beard and long hair, who sold
+scythe-snaths in that region, and about whom there was a rumor that he
+was once caught and shaved by the indignant farmers, who apprehended in
+his long locks a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh, the world
+had vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a vast basin of
+forest, there was a notch in the horizon and an opening in the line of
+woods, where the road ran. Through this opening John imagined an army
+might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red and of
+yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about and point its long nose, and
+open on the valley. He fancied the army, after this salute, winding down
+the mountain road, deploying in the meadows, and giving the valley to
+pillage and to flame. In which event his position would be an excellent
+one for observation and for safety. While he was in the height of
+this engagement, perhaps the horn would be blown from the back porch,
+reminding him that it was time to quit cutting brush and go for the
+cows. As if there were no better use for a warrior and a poet in New
+England than to send him for the cows!
+
+John knew a boy--a bad enough boy I daresay--who afterwards became a
+general in the war, and went to Congress, and got to be a real governor,
+who also used to be sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and hated it
+in his very soul; and by his wrong conduct forecast what kind of a man
+he would be. This boy, as soon as he had cut about one brush, would
+seek for one of several holes in the ground (and he was familiar with
+several), in which lived a white-and-black animal that must always be
+nameless in a book, but an animal quite capable of the most pungent
+defense of himself. This young aspirant to Congress would cut a long
+stick, with a little crotch in the end of it, and run it into the hole;
+and when the crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal,
+he would twist the stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, and
+then he would pull the beast out; and when he got the white-and-black
+just out of the hole so that his dog could seize him, the boy would take
+to his heels, and leave the two to fight it out, content to scent the
+battle afar off. And this boy, who was in training for public life,
+would do this sort of thing all the afternoon, and when the sun told him
+that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he would industriously
+go home as innocent as anybody. There are few such boys as this
+nowadays; and that is the reason why the New England pastures are so
+much overgrown with brush.
+
+John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck. He bore a
+special grudge against this clover-eater, beyond the usual hostility
+that boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his way to school
+a woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The
+woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree. John
+thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under the
+tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck
+dropped down on John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. John was
+both enraged and scared by this dastardly attack; the teeth of the enemy
+went through the cloth and met; and there he hung. John then made a
+pivot of one leg and whirled himself around, swinging the woodchuck
+in the air, until he shook him off; but in his departure the woodchuck
+carried away a large piece of John's summer trousers-leg. The boy never
+forgot it. And whenever he had a holiday, he used to expend an amount
+of labor and ingenuity in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have made
+his for tune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill pasture, down
+on one side of which ran a small brook, and this pasture was full of
+woodchuck-holes. It required the assistance of several boys to capture a
+woodchuck. It was first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that
+the woodchuck was at home. When one was seen to enter his burrow, then
+all the entries to it except one--there are usually three--were plugged
+up with stones. A boy and a dog were then left to watch the open hole,
+while John and his comrades went to the brook and began to dig a canal,
+to turn the water into the residence of the woodchuck. This was often a
+difficult feat of engineering, and a long job. Often it took more than
+half a day of hard labor with shovel and hoe to dig the canal. But when
+the canal was finished and the water began to pour into the hole, the
+excitement began. How long would it take to fill the hole and drown out
+the woodchuck? Sometimes it seemed as if the hole was a bottomless pit.
+But sooner or later the water would rise in it, and then there was sure
+to be seen the nose of the woodchuck, keeping itself on a level with
+the rising flood. It was piteous to see the anxious look of the hunted,
+half-drowned creature as--it came to the surface and caught sight of
+the dog. There the dog stood, at the mouth of the hole, quivering with
+excitement from his nose to the tip of his tail, and behind him were the
+cruel boys dancing with joy and setting the dog on. The poor creature
+would disappear in the water in terror; but he must breathe, and out
+would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time. At last the water
+ran out of the hole as well as in, and the soaked beast came with it,
+and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the dog had him, and the boys
+stood off in a circle, with stones in their hands, to see what they
+called “fair play.” They maintained perfect “neutrality” so long as the
+dog was getting the best of the woodchuck; but if the latter was likely
+to escape, they “interfered” in the interest of peace and the “balance
+of power,” and killed the woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice;
+of course, he'd no business to be a woodchuck,--an--unspeakable
+woodchuck.
+
+I used the word “aromatic” in relation to the New England soil. John
+knew very well all its sweet, aromatic, pungent, and medicinal products,
+and liked to search for the scented herbs and the wild fruits and
+exquisite flowers; but he did not then know, and few do know, that there
+is no part of the globe where the subtle chemistry of the earth produces
+more that is agreeable to the senses than a New England hill-pasture and
+the green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded in turning our
+attention from it to the comparatively barren Orient as the land of
+sweet-smelling spices and odorous gums. And it is indeed a constant
+surprise that this poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so many
+delicate and aromatic products.
+
+John, it is true, did not care much for anything that did not appeal to
+his taste and smell and delight in brilliant color; and he trod down the
+exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses--without compunction. But he
+gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the eglantine
+and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry,
+the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and
+fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the
+wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of
+the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red
+berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed
+the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called
+“brake,” which he pulled up, and found that the soft end “tasted good;”
+ he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he
+could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty
+to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread,
+the tansy, and the loathsome “boneset;” and he laid in for the winter,
+like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts,
+chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which lives most vividly in his
+memory and most strongly draws him back to the New England hills is the
+aromatic sweet-fern; he likes to eat its spicy seeds, and to crush in
+his hands its fragrant leaves; their odor is the unique essence of New
+England.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. JOHN'S REVIVAL.
+
+The New England country-boy of the last generation never heard of
+Christmas. There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came
+across it in his reading, he attached no meaning to the word.
+
+If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders about
+it, he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind of Popish
+holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked as “card-playing,”
+ or being a “Democrat.” John knew a couple of desperately bad boys who
+were reported to play “seven-up” in a barn, on the haymow, and the
+enormity of this practice made him shudder. He had once seen a pack of
+greasy “playing-cards,” and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence
+of sin. If he had desired to defy all Divine law and outrage all human
+society, he felt that he could do it by shuffling them. And he was quite
+right. The two bad boys enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime,
+because they knew it was the most wicked thing they could do. If it had
+been as sinless as playing marbles, they would n't have cared for
+it. John sometimes drove past a brown, tumble-down farmhouse, whose
+shiftless inhabitants, it was said, were card-playing people; and it is
+impossible to describe how wicked that house appeared to John. He almost
+expected to see its shingles stand on end. In the old New England one
+could not in any other way so express his contempt of all holy and
+orderly life as by playing cards for amusement.
+
+There was no element of Christmas in John's life, any more than there
+was of Easter; and probably nobody about him could have explained
+Easter; and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas gifts.
+Indeed, he never had any presents of any kind, either on his birthday or
+any other day. He expected nothing that he did not earn, or make in
+the way of “trade” with another boy. He was taught to work for what he
+received. He even earned, as I said, the extra holidays of the day after
+the Fourth and the day after Thanksgiving. Of the free grace and gifts
+of Christmas he had no conception. The single and melancholy association
+he had with it was the quaking hymn which his grandfather used to sing
+in a cracked and quavering voice:
+
+       “While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
+        All seated on the ground.”
+
+The “glory” that “shone around” at the end of it--the doleful voice
+always repeating, “and glory shone around “--made John as miserable as
+“Hark! from the tombs.” It was all one dreary expectation of something
+uncomfortable. It was, in short, “religion.” You'd got to have it some
+time; that John believed. But it lay in his unthinking mind to put off
+the “Hark! from the tombs” enjoyment as long as possible. He experienced
+a kind of delightful wickedness in indulging his dislike of hymns and of
+Sunday.
+
+John was not a model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his
+wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor much to lie;
+and he despised “meanness” and stinginess, and had a chivalrous feeling
+toward little girls. Probably it never occurred to him that there was
+any virtue in not stealing and lying, for honesty and veracity were in
+the atmosphere about him. He hated work, and he “got mad” easily; but he
+did work, and he was always ashamed when he was over his fit of passion.
+In short, you couldn't find a much better wicked boy than John.
+
+When the “revival” came, therefore, one summer, John was in a quandary.
+Sunday meeting and Sunday-school he did n't mind; they were a part of
+regular life, and only temporarily interrupted a boy's pleasures. But
+when there began to be evening meetings at the different houses, a
+new element came into affairs. There was a kind of solemnity over the
+community, and a seriousness in all faces. At first these twilight
+assemblies offered a little relief to the monotony of farm life; and
+John liked to meet the boys and girls, and to watch the older people
+coming in, dressed in their second best. I think John's imagination was
+worked upon by the sweet and mournful hymns that were discordantly sung
+in the stiff old parlors. There was a suggestion of Sunday, and sanctity
+too, in the odor of caraway-seed that pervaded the room. The windows
+were wide open also, and the scent of June roses came in, with all the
+languishing sounds of a summer night. All the little boys had a scared
+look, but the little girls were never so pretty and demure as in this
+their susceptible seriousness. If John saw a boy who did not come to the
+evening meeting, but was wandering off with his sling down the
+meadow, looking for frogs, maybe, that boy seemed to him a monster of
+wickedness.
+
+After a time, as the meetings continued, John fell also under the
+general impression of fright and seriousness. All the talk was
+of “getting religion,” and he heard over and over again that the
+probability was if he did not get it now, he never would. The chance did
+not come often, and if this offer was not improved, John would be given
+over to hardness of heart. His obstinacy would show that he was not one
+of the elect. John fancied that he could feel his heart hardening, and
+he began to look with a wistful anxiety into the faces of the Christians
+to see what were the visible signs of being one of the elect. John put
+on a good deal of a manner that he “did n't care,” and he never admitted
+his disquiet by asking any questions or standing up in meeting to be
+prayed for. But he did care. He heard all the time that all he had to do
+was to repent and believe. But there was nothing that he doubted, and he
+was perfectly willing to repent if he could think of anything to repent
+of.
+
+It was essential he learned, that he should have a “conviction of sin.”
+ This he earnestly tried to have. Other people, no better than he, had
+it, and he wondered why he could n't have it. Boys and girls whom he
+knew were “under conviction,” and John began to feel not only panicky,
+but lonesome. Cynthia Rudd had been anxious for days and days, and
+not able to sleep at night, but now she had given herself up and found
+peace. There was a kind of radiance in her face that struck John
+with awe, and he felt that now there was a great gulf between him and
+Cynthia. Everybody was going away from him, and his heart was getting
+harder than ever. He could n't feel wicked, all he could do. And there
+was Ed Bates his intimate friend, though older than he, a “whaling,”
+ noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction and sure he was going to be
+lost. How John envied him! And pretty soon Ed “experienced religion.”
+ John anxiously watched the change in Ed's face when he became one of the
+elect. And a change there was. And John wondered about another thing.
+Ed Bates used to go trout-fishing, with a tremendously long pole, in a
+meadow brook near the river; and when the trout didn't bite right off,
+Ed would--get mad, and as soon as one took hold he would give an awful
+jerk, sending the fish more than three hundred feet into the air and
+landing it in the bushes the other side of the meadow, crying out, “Gul
+darn ye, I'll learn ye.” And John wondered if Ed would take the little
+trout out any more gently now.
+
+John felt more and more lonesome as one after another of his playmates
+came out and made a profession. Cynthia (she too was older than John)
+sat on Sunday in the singers' seat; her voice, which was going to be a
+contralto, had a wonderful pathos in it for him, and he heard it with a
+heartache. “There she is,” thought John, “singing away like an angel in
+heaven, and I am left out.” During all his after life a contralto voice
+was to John one of his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures. It
+suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable.
+
+If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself into a conviction of sin,
+John tried. And what made him miserable was, that he couldn't feel
+miserable when everybody else was miserable. He even began to pretend
+to be so. He put on a serious and anxious look like the others. He
+pretended he did n't care for play; he refrained from chasing chipmunks
+and snaring suckers; the songs of birds and the bright vivacity of the
+summer--time that used to make him turn hand-springs smote him as a
+discordant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, and he was getting to
+be alarmed that he was not alarmed at himself. Every day and night he
+heard that the spirit of the Lord would probably soon quit striving with
+him, and leave him out. The phrase was that he would “grieve away the
+Holy Spirit.” John wondered if he was not doing it. He did everything
+to put himself in the way of conviction, was constant at the evening
+meetings, wore a grave face, refrained from play, and tried to feel
+anxious. At length he concluded that he must do something.
+
+One night as he walked home from a solemn meeting, at which several of
+his little playmates had “come forward,” he felt that he could force
+the crisis. He was alone on the sandy road; it was an enchanting summer
+night; the stars danced overhead, and by his side the broad and shallow
+river ran over its stony bed with a loud but soothing murmur that filled
+all the air with entreaty. John did not then know that it sang, “But I
+go on forever,” yet there was in it for him something of the solemn flow
+of the eternal world. When he came in sight of the house, he knelt down
+in the dust by a pile of rails and prayed. He prayed that he might feel
+bad, and be distressed about himself. As he prayed he heard distinctly,
+and yet not as a disturbance, the multitudinous croaking of the frogs by
+the meadow spring. It was not discordant with his thoughts; it had in
+it a melancholy pathos, as if it were a kind of call to the unconverted.
+What is there in this sound that suggests the tenderness of spring, the
+despair of a summer night, the desolateness of young love? Years after
+it happened to John to be at twilight at a railway station on the edge
+of the Ravenna marshes. A little way over the purple plain he saw the
+darkening towers and heard “the sweet bells of Imola.” The Holy Pontiff
+Pius IX. was born at Imola, and passed his boyhood in that serene and
+moist region. As the train waited, John heard from miles of marshes
+round about the evening song of millions of frogs, louder and more
+melancholy and entreating than the vesper call of the bells. And
+instantly his mind went back for the association of sound is as subtle
+as that of odor--to the prayer, years ago, by the roadside and the
+plaintive appeal of the unheeded frogs, and he wondered if the little
+Pope had not heard the like importunity, and perhaps, when he thought of
+himself as a little Pope, associated his conversion with this plaintive
+sound.
+
+John prayed, but without feeling any worse, and then went desperately
+into the house, and told the family that he was in an anxious state of
+mind. This was joyful news to the sweet and pious household, and the
+little boy was urged to feel that he was a sinner, to repent, and to
+become that night a Christian; he was prayed over, and told to read the
+Bible, and put to bed with the injunction to repeat all the texts of
+Scripture and hymns he could think of. John did this, and said over
+and over the few texts he was master of, and tossed about in a real
+discontent now, for he had a dim notion that he was playing the
+hypocrite a little. But he was sincere enough in wanting to feel, as
+the other boys and girls felt, that he was a wicked sinner. He tried to
+think of his evil deeds; and one occurred to him; indeed, it often came
+to his mind. It was a lie; a deliberate, awful lie, that never injured
+anybody but himself John knew he was not wicked enough to tell a lie to
+injure anybody else.
+
+This was the lie. One afternoon at school, just before John's class was
+to recite in geography, his pretty cousin, a young lady he held in great
+love and respect, came in to visit the school. John was a favorite with
+her, and she had come to hear him recite. As it happened, John felt
+shaky in the geographical lesson of that day, and he feared to be
+humiliated in the presence of his cousin; he felt embarrassed to that
+degree that he could n't have “bounded” Massachusetts. So he stood up
+and raised his hand, and said to the schoolma'am, “Please, ma'am, I
+'ve got the stomach-ache; may I go home?” And John's character for
+truthfulness was so high (and even this was ever a reproach to him),
+that his word was instantly believed, and he was dismissed without
+any medical examination. For a moment John was delighted to get out of
+school so early; but soon his guilt took all the light out of the summer
+sky and the pleasantness out of nature. He had to walk slowly, without
+a single hop or jump, as became a diseased boy. The sight of a woodchuck
+at a distance from his well-known hole tempted John, but he restrained
+himself, lest somebody should see him, and know that chasing a woodchuck
+was inconsistent with the stomach-ache. He was acting a miserable part,
+but it had to be gone through with. He went home and told his mother the
+reason he had left school, but he added that he felt “some” better now.
+The “some” did n't save him. Genuine sympathy was lavished on him.
+He had to swallow a stiff dose of nasty “picra,”--the horror of all
+childhood, and he was put in bed immediately. The world never looked so
+pleasant to John, but to bed he was forced to go. He was excused from
+all chores; he was not even to go after the cows. John said he thought
+he ought to go after the cows,--much as he hated the business usually,
+he would now willingly have wandered over the world after cows,--and for
+this heroic offer, in the condition he was, he got credit for a desire
+to do his duty; and this unjust confidence in him added to his torture.
+And he had intended to set his hooks that night for eels. His cousin
+came home, and sat by his bedside and condoled with him; his schoolma'am
+had sent word how sorry she was for him, John was Such a good boy. All
+this was dreadful.
+
+He groaned in agony. Besides, he was not to have any supper; it would
+be very dangerous to eat a morsel. The prospect was appalling. Never
+was there such a long twilight; never before did he hear so many sounds
+outdoors that he wanted to investigate. Being ill without any illness
+was a horrible condition. And he began to have real stomach-ache now;
+and it ached because it was empty. John was hungry enough to have eaten
+the New England Primer. But by and by sleep came, and John forgot his
+woes in dreaming that he knew where Madagascar was just as easy as
+anything.
+
+It was this lie that came back to John the night he was trying to
+be affected by the revival. And he was very much ashamed of it, and
+believed he would never tell another. But then he fell thinking whether,
+with the “picra,” and the going to bed in the afternoon, and the loss
+of his supper, he had not been sufficiently paid for it. And in this
+unhopeful frame of mind he dropped off in sleep.
+
+And the truth must be told, that in the morning John was no nearer to
+realizing the terrors he desired to feel. But he was a conscientious
+boy, and would do nothing to interfere with the influences of the
+season. He not only put himself away from them all, but he refrained
+from doing almost everything that he wanted to do. There came at that
+time a newspaper, a secular newspaper, which had in it a long account
+of the Long Island races, in which the famous horse “Lexington” was a
+runner. John was fond of horses, he knew about Lexington, and he had
+looked forward to the result of this race with keen interest. But to
+read the account of it how he felt might destroy his seriousness of
+mind, and in all reverence and simplicity he felt it--be a means of
+“grieving away the Holy Spirit.” He therefore hid away the paper in
+a table-drawer, intending to read it when the revival should be over.
+Weeks after, when he looked for the newspaper, it was not to be found,
+and John never knew what “time” Lexington made nor anything about the
+race. This was to him a serious loss, but by no means so deep as another
+feeling that remained with him; for when his little world returned to
+its ordinary course, and long after, John had an uneasy apprehension
+of his own separateness from other people, in his insensibility to the
+revival. Perhaps the experience was a damage to him; and it is a pity
+that there was no one to explain that religion for a little fellow like
+him is not a “scheme.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII. WAR
+
+Every boy who is good for anything is a natural savage. The scientists
+who want to study the primitive man, and have so much difficulty in
+finding one anywhere in this sophisticated age, couldn't do better than
+to devote their attention to the common country-boy. He has the primal,
+vigorous instincts and impulses of the African savage, without any of
+the vices inherited from a civilization long ago decayed or developed in
+an unrestrained barbaric society. You want to catch your boy young, and
+study him before he has either virtues or vices, in order to understand
+the primitive man.
+
+Every New England boy desires (or did desire a generation ago, before
+children were born sophisticated, with a large library, and with the
+word “culture” written on their brows) to live by hunting, fishing, and
+war. The military instinct, which is the special mark of barbarism, is
+strong in him. It arises not alone from his love of fighting, for the
+boy is naturally as cowardly as the savage, but from his fondness for
+display,--the same that a corporal or a general feels in decking himself
+in tinsel and tawdry colors and strutting about in view of the female
+sex. Half the pleasure in going out to murder another man with a gun
+would be wanting if one did not wear feathers and gold-lace and stripes
+on his pantaloons. The law also takes this view of it, and will not
+permit men to shoot each other in plain clothes. And the world also
+makes some curious distinctions in the art of killing. To kill people
+with arrows is barbarous; to kill them with smooth-bores and flintlock
+muskets is semi-civilized; to kill them with breech-loading rifles is
+civilized. That nation is the most civilized which has the appliances to
+kill the most of another nation in the shortest time. This is the result
+of six thousand years of constant civilization. By and by, when the
+nations cease to be boys, perhaps they will not want to kill each other
+at all. Some people think the world is very old; but here is an evidence
+that it is very young, and, in fact, has scarcely yet begun to be a
+world. When the volcanoes have done spouting, and the earthquakes are
+quaked out, and you can tell what land is going to be solid and keep its
+level twenty-four hours, and the swamps are filled up, and the deltas of
+the great rivers, like the Mississippi and the Nile, become terra firma,
+and men stop killing their fellows in order to get their land and other
+property, then perhaps there will be a world that an angel would n't
+weep over. Now one half the world are employed in getting ready to
+kill the other half, some of them by marching about in uniform, and the
+others by hard work to earn money to pay taxes to buy uniforms and guns.
+
+John was not naturally very cruel, and it was probably the love of
+display quite as much as of fighting that led him into a military life;
+for he, in common with all his comrades, had other traits of the savage.
+One of them was the same passion for ornament that induces the African
+to wear anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal, and to decorate
+himself with tufts of hair, and to tattoo his body. In John's day there
+was a rage at school among the boys for wearing bracelets woven of
+the hair of the little girls. Some of them were wonderful specimens of
+braiding and twist. These were not captured in war, but were sentimental
+tokens of friendship given by the young maidens themselves. John's own
+hair was kept so short (as became a warrior) that you couldn't have made
+a bracelet out of it, or anything except a paintbrush; but the little
+girls were not under military law, and they willingly sacrificed their
+tresses to decorate the soldiers they esteemed. As the Indian is honored
+in proportion to the scalps he can display, at John's school the boy
+was held in highest respect who could show the most hair trophies on his
+wrist. John himself had a variety that would have pleased a Mohawk, fine
+and coarse and of all colors. There were the flaxen, the faded straw,
+the glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the undecided
+auburn, and the fiery red. Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly under the
+red hair of Cynthia Rudd than on account of all the other wristlets put
+together; it was a sort of gold-tried-in-the-fire-color to John,
+and burned there with a steady flame. Now that Cynthia had become
+a Christian, this band of hair seemed a more sacred if less glowing
+possession (for all detached hair will fade in time), and if he had
+known anything about saints, he would have imagined that it was a part
+of the aureole that always goes with a saint. But I am bound to say that
+while John had a tender feeling for this red string, his sentiment was
+not that of the man who becomes entangled in the meshes of a woman's
+hair; and he valued rather the number than the quality of these elastic
+wristlets.
+
+John burned with as real a military ardor as ever inflamed the breast of
+any slaughterer of his fellows. He liked to read of war, of encounters
+with the Indians, of any kind of wholesale killing in glittering
+uniform, to the noise of the terribly exciting fife and drum, which
+maddened the combatants and drowned the cries of the wounded. In his
+future he saw himself a soldier with plume and sword and snug-fitting,
+decorated clothes,--very different from his somewhat roomy trousers and
+country-cut roundabout, made by Aunt Ellis, the village tailoress, who
+cut out clothes, not according to the shape of the boy, but to what
+he was expected to grow to,--going where glory awaited him. In his
+observation of pictures, it was the common soldier who was always
+falling and dying, while the officer stood unharmed in the storm of
+bullets and waved his sword in a heroic attitude. John determined to be
+an officer.
+
+It is needless to say that he was an ardent member of the military
+company of his village. He had risen from the grade of corporal to that
+of first lieutenant; the captain was a boy whose father was captain
+of the grown militia company, and consequently had inherited military
+aptness and knowledge. The old captain was a flaming son of Mars, whose
+nose militia, war, general training, and New England rum had painted
+with the color of glory and disaster. He was one of the gallant old
+soldiers of the peaceful days of our country, splendid in uniform, a
+martinet in drill, terrible in oaths, a glorious object when he marched
+at the head of his company of flintlock muskets, with the American
+banner full high advanced, and the clamorous drum defying the world.
+In this he fulfilled his duties of citizen, faithfully teaching his
+uniformed companions how to march by the left leg, and to get reeling
+drunk by sundown; otherwise he did n't amount to much in the community;
+his house was unpainted, his fences were tumbled down, his farm was a
+waste, his wife wore an old gown to meeting, to which the captain never
+went; but he was a good trout-fisher, and there was no man in town who
+spent more time at the country store and made more shrewd observations
+upon the affairs of his neighbors. Although he had never been in an
+asylum any more than he had been in war, he was almost as perfect a
+drunkard as he was soldier. He hated the British, whom he had never
+seen, as much as he loved rum, from which he was never separated.
+
+The company which his son commanded, wearing his father's belt and
+sword, was about as effective as the old company, and more orderly.
+It contained from thirty to fifty boys, according to the pressure of
+“chores” at home, and it had its great days of parade and its autumn
+maneuvers, like the general training. It was an artillery company,
+which gave every boy a chance to wear a sword, and it possessed a small
+mounted cannon, which was dragged about and limbered and unlimbered and
+fired, to the imminent danger of everybody, especially of the company.
+In point of marching, with all the legs going together, and twisting
+itself up and untwisting breaking into single-file (for Indian
+fighting), and forming platoons, turning a sharp corner, and getting
+out of the way of a wagon, circling the town pump, frightening horses,
+stopping short in front of the tavern, with ranks dressed and eyes right
+and left, it was the equal of any military organization I ever saw. It
+could train better than the big company, and I think it did more good
+in keeping alive the spirit of patriotism and desire to fight. Its
+discipline was strict. If a boy left the ranks to jab a spectator, or
+make faces at a window, or “go for” a striped snake, he was “hollered”
+ at no end.
+
+It was altogether a very serious business; there was no levity about
+the hot and hard marching, and as boys have no humor, nothing ludicrous
+occurred. John was very proud of his office, and of his ability to keep
+the rear ranks closed up and ready to execute any maneuver when the
+captain “hollered,” which he did continually. He carried a real sword,
+which his grandfather had worn in many a militia campaign on the village
+green, the rust upon which John fancied was Indian blood; he had various
+red and yellow insignia of military rank sewed upon different parts
+of his clothes, and though his cocked hat was of pasteboard, it was
+decorated with gilding and bright rosettes, and floated a red feather
+that made his heart beat with martial fury whenever he looked at it. The
+effect of this uniform upon the girls was not a matter of conjecture. I
+think they really cared nothing about it, but they pretended to think
+it fine, and they fed the poor boy's vanity, the weakness by which women
+govern the world.
+
+The exalted happiness of John in this military service I daresay was
+never equaled in any subsequent occupation. The display of the company
+in the village filled him with the loftiest heroism. There was nothing
+wanting but an enemy to fight, but this could only be had by half the
+company staining themselves with elderberry juice and going into the
+woods as Indians, to fight the artillery from behind trees with bows
+and arrows, or to ambush it and tomahawk the gunners. This, however, was
+made to seem very like real war. Traditions of Indian cruelty were still
+fresh in western Massachusetts. Behind John's house in the orchard were
+some old slate tombstones, sunken and leaning, which recorded the names
+of Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms, who had been killed by Indians
+in the last century while at work in the meadow by the river, and who
+slept there in the hope of the glorious resurrection. Phineas Arms
+martial name--was long since dust, and even the mortal part of the great
+Captain Moses Rice had been absorbed in the soil and passed perhaps with
+the sap up into the old but still blooming apple-trees. It was a quiet
+place where they lay, but they might have heard--if hear they could--the
+loud, continuous roar of the Deerfield, and the stirring of the long
+grass on that sunny slope. There was a tradition that years ago an
+Indian, probably the last of his race, had been seen moving along the
+crest of the mountain, and gazing down into the lovely valley which had
+been the favorite home of his tribe, upon the fields where he grew his
+corn, and the sparkling stream whence he drew his fish. John used to
+fancy at times, as he sat there, that he could see that red specter
+gliding among the trees on the hill; and if the tombstone suggested to
+him the trump of judgment, he could not separate it from the war-whoop
+that had been the last sound in the ear of Phineas Arms. The Indian
+always preceded murder by the war-whoop; and this was an advantage
+that the artillery had in the fight with the elderberry Indians. It was
+warned in time. If there was no war-whoop, the killing did n't count;
+the artillery man got up and killed the Indian. The Indian usually had
+the worst of it; he not only got killed by the regulars, but he got
+whipped by the home guard at night for staining himself and his clothes
+with the elderberry.
+
+But once a year the company had a superlative parade. This was when the
+military company from the north part of the town joined the villagers in
+a general muster. This was an infantry company, and not to be compared
+with that of the village in point of evolutions. There was a great and
+natural hatred between the north town boys and the center. I don't know
+why, but no contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. It was all
+right for one of either section to “lick” the other if he could, or for
+half a dozen to “lick” one of the enemy if they caught him alone. The
+notion of honor, as of mercy, comes into the boy only when he is pretty
+well grown; to some neither ever comes. And yet there was an artificial
+military courtesy (something like that existing in the feudal age, no
+doubt) which put the meeting of these two rival and mutually detested
+companies on a high plane of behavior. It was beautiful to see the
+seriousness of this lofty and studied condescension on both sides. For
+the time everything was under martial law. The village company being
+the senior, its captain commanded the united battalion in the march, and
+this put John temporarily into the position of captain, with the right
+to march at the head and “holler;” a responsibility which realized all
+his hopes of glory. I suppose there has yet been discovered by man no
+gratification like that of marching at the head of a column in uniform
+on parade, unless, perhaps, it is marching at their head when they
+are leaving a field of battle. John experienced all the thrill of this
+conspicuous authority, and I daresay that nothing in his later life has
+so exalted him in his own esteem; certainly nothing has since happened
+that was so important as the events of that parade day seemed. He
+satiated himself with all the delights of war.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. COUNTRY SCENES
+
+It is impossible to say at what age a New England country-boy becomes
+conscious that his trousers-legs are too short, and is anxious about
+the part of his hair and the fit of his woman-made roundabout. These
+harrowing thoughts come to him later than to the city lad. At least, a
+generation ago he served a long apprenticeship with nature only for a
+master, absolutely unconscious of the artificialities of life.
+
+But I do not think his early education was neglected. And yet it is
+easy to underestimate the influences that, unconsciously to him, were
+expanding his mind and nursing in him heroic purposes. There was the
+lovely but narrow valley, with its rapid mountain stream; there were the
+great hills which he climbed, only to see other hills stretching away
+to a broken and tempting horizon; there were the rocky pastures, and
+the wide sweeps of forest through which the winter tempests howled,
+upon which hung the haze of summer heat, over which the great shadows of
+summer clouds traveled; there were the clouds themselves, shouldering
+up above the peaks, hurrying across the narrow sky,--the clouds out of
+which the wind came, and the lightning and the sudden dashes of rain;
+and there were days when the sky was ineffably blue and distant, a
+fathomless vault of heaven where the hen-hawk and the eagle poised on
+outstretched wings and watched for their prey. Can you say how these
+things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few books and no contact
+with the great world? Do you think any city lad could have written
+“Thanatopsis” at eighteen?
+
+If you had seen John, in his short and roomy trousers and ill-used straw
+hat, picking his barefooted way over the rocks along the river-bank of
+a cool morning to see if an eel had “got on,” you would not have fancied
+that he lived in an ideal world. Nor did he consciously. So far as he
+knew, he had no more sentiment than a jack-knife. Although he loved
+Cynthia Rudd devotedly, and blushed scarlet one day when his cousin
+found a lock of Cynthia's flaming hair in the box where John kept his
+fishhooks, spruce gum, flag-root, tickets of standing at the head,
+gimlet, billets-doux in blue ink, a vile liquid in a bottle to make
+fish bite, and other precious possessions, yet Cynthia's society had no
+attractions for him comparable to a day's trout-fishing. She was, after
+all, only a single and a very undefined item in his general ideal
+world, and there was no harm in letting his imagination play about
+her illumined head. Since Cynthia had “got religion” and John had
+got nothing, his love was tempered with a little awe and a feeling of
+distance. He was not fickle, and yet I cannot say that he was not ready
+to construct a new romance, in which Cynthia should be eliminated.
+Nothing was easier. Perhaps it was a luxurious traveling carriage, drawn
+by two splendid horses in plated harness, driven along the sandy road.
+There were a gentleman and a young lad on the front seat, and on the
+back seat a handsome pale lady with a little girl beside her. Behind, on
+the rack with the trunk, was a colored boy, an imp out of a story-book.
+John was told that the black boy was a slave, and that the carriage
+was from Baltimore. Here was a chance for a romance. Slavery, beauty,
+wealth, haughtiness, especially on the part of the slender boy on the
+front seat,--here was an opening into a vast realm. The high-stepping
+horses and the shining harness were enough to excite John's admiration,
+but these were nothing to the little girl. His eyes had never before
+fallen upon that kind of girl; he had hardly imagined that such a lovely
+creature could exist. Was it the soft and dainty toilet, was it the
+brown curls, or the large laughing eyes, or the delicate, finely cut
+features, or the charming little figure of this fairy-like person? Was
+this expression on her mobile face merely that of amusement at seeing
+a country-boy? Then John hated her. On the contrary, did she see in him
+what John felt himself to be? Then he would go the world over to serve
+her. In a moment he was self-conscious. His trousers seemed to creep
+higher up his legs, and he could feel his very ankles blush. He hoped
+that she had not seen the other side of him, for, in fact, the patches
+were not of the exact shade of the rest of the cloth. The vision flashed
+by him in a moment, but it left him with a resentful feeling. Perhaps
+that proud little girl would be sorry some day, when he had become a
+general, or written a book, or kept a store, to see him go away and
+marry another. He almost made up his cruel mind on the instant that he
+would never marry her, however bad she might feel. And yet he could
+n't get her out of his mind for days and days, and when her image was
+present, even Cynthia in the singers' seat on Sunday looked a little
+cheap and common. Poor Cynthia! Long before John became a general or
+had his revenge on the Baltimore girl, she married a farmer and was the
+mother of children, red-headed; and when John saw her years after, she
+looked tired and discouraged, as one who has carried into womanhood none
+of the romance of her youth.
+
+Fishing and dreaming, I think, were the best amusements John had. The
+middle pier of the long covered bridge over the river stood upon a great
+rock, and this rock (which was known as the swimming-rock, whence the
+boys on summer evenings dove into the deep pool by its side) was a
+favorite spot with John when he could get an hour or two from the
+everlasting “chores.” Making his way out to it over the rocks at low
+water with his fish-pole, there he was content to sit and observe the
+world; and there he saw a great deal of life. He always expected to
+catch the legendary trout which weighed two pounds and was believed to
+inhabit that pool. He always did catch horned dace and shiners, which he
+despised, and sometimes he snared a monstrous sucker a foot and a half
+long. But in the summer the sucker is a flabby fish, and John was not
+thanked for bringing him home. He liked, however, to lie with his
+face close to the water and watch the long fishes panting in the clear
+depths, and occasionally he would drop a pebble near one to see how
+gracefully he would scud away with one wave of the tail into deeper
+water. Nothing fears the little brown boy. The yellow-bird slants his
+wings, almost touches the deep water before him, and then escapes away
+under the bridge to the east with a glint of sunshine on his back; the
+fish-hawk comes down with a swoop, dips one wing, and, his prey having
+darted under a stone, is away again over the still hill, high soaring on
+even-poised pinions, keeping an eye perhaps upon the great eagle which
+is sweeping the sky in widening circles.
+
+But there is other life. A wagon rumbles over the bridge, and the farmer
+and his wife, jogging along, do not know that they have startled a lazy
+boy into a momentary fancy that a thunder-shower is coming up. John
+can see as he lies there on a still summer day, with the fishes and
+the birds for company, the road that comes down the left bank of the
+river,--a hot, sandy, well-traveled road, hidden from view here and
+there by trees and bushes. The chief point of interest, however, is an
+enormous sycamore-tree by the roadside and in front of John's house. The
+house is more than a century old, and its timbers were hewed and squared
+by Captain Moses Rice (who lies in his grave on the hillside above it),
+in the presence of the Red Man who killed him with arrow and tomahawk
+some time after his house was set in order. The gigantic tree, struck
+with a sort of leprosy, like all its species, appears much older, and of
+course has its tradition. They say that it grew from a green stake which
+the first land-surveyor planted there for one of his points of sight.
+John was reminded of it years after when he sat under the shade of the
+decrepit lime-tree in Freiburg and was told that it was originally a
+twig which the breathless and bloody messenger carried in his hand when
+he dropped exhausted in the square with the word “Victory!” on his lips,
+announcing thus the result of the glorious battle of Morat, where the
+Swiss in 1476 defeated Charles the Bold. Under the broad but scanty
+shade of the great button-ball tree (as it was called) stood an old
+watering-trough, with its half-decayed penstock and well-worn spout
+pouring forever cold, sparkling water into the overflowing trough. It is
+fed by a spring near by, and the water is sweeter and colder than any in
+the known world, unless it be the well Zem-zem, as generations of people
+and horses which have drunk of it would testify, if they could come
+back. And if they could file along this road again, what a procession
+there would be riding down the valley!--antiquated vehicles, rusty
+wagons adorned with the invariable buffalo-robe even in the hottest
+days, lean and long-favored horses, frisky colts, drawing, generation
+after generation, the sober and pious saints, that passed this way to
+meeting and to mill.
+
+What a refreshment is that water-spout! All day long there are pilgrims
+to it, and John likes nothing better than to watch them. Here comes a
+gray horse drawing a buggy with two men,--cattle buyers, probably.
+Out jumps a man, down goes the check-rein. What a good draught the nag
+takes! Here comes a long-stepping trotter in a sulky; man in a brown
+linen coat and wide-awake hat,--dissolute, horsey-looking man. They turn
+up, of course. Ah, there is an establishment he knows well: a sorrel
+horse and an old chaise. The sorrel horse scents the water afar off, and
+begins to turn up long before he reaches the trough, thrusting out his
+nose in anticipation of the coot sensation. No check to let down; he
+plunges his nose in nearly to his eyes in his haste to get at it. Two
+maiden ladies--unmistakably such, though they appear neither “anxious
+nor aimless”--within the scoop-top smile benevolently on the sorrel
+back. It is the deacon's horse, a meeting-going nag, with a sedate,
+leisurely jog as he goes; and these are two of the “salt of the
+earth,”--the brevet rank of the women who stand and wait,--going down to
+the village store to dicker. There come two men in a hurry, horse driven
+up smartly and pulled up short; but as it is rising ground, and the
+horse does not easily reach the water with the wagon pulling back, the
+nervous man in the buggy hitches forward on his seat, as if that would
+carry the wagon a little ahead! Next, lumber-wagon with load of boards;
+horse wants to turn up, and driver switches him and cries “G'lang,” and
+the horse reluctantly goes by, turning his head wistfully towards the
+flowing spout. Ah, here comes an equipage strange to these parts, and
+John stands up to look; an elegant carriage and two horses; trunks
+strapped on behind; gentleman and boy on front seat and two ladies on
+back seat,--city people. The gentleman descends, unchecks the horses,
+wipes his brow, takes a drink at the spout and looks around, evidently
+remarking upon the lovely view, as he swings his handkerchief in an
+explanatory manner. Judicious travelers. John would like to know who
+they are. Perhaps they are from Boston, whence come all the wonderfully
+painted peddlers' wagons drawn by six stalwart horses, which the driver,
+using no rein, controls with his long whip and cheery voice. If so,
+great is the condescension of Boston; and John follows them with an
+undefined longing as they drive away toward the mountains of Zoar. Here
+is a footman, dusty and tired, who comes with lagging steps. He stops,
+removes his hat, as he should to such a tree, puts his mouth to the
+spout, and takes a long pull at the lively water. And then he goes on,
+perhaps to Zoar, perhaps to a worse place.
+
+So they come and go all the summer afternoon; but the great event of
+the day is the passing down the valley of the majestic stage-coach,--the
+vast yellow-bodied, rattling vehicle. John can hear a mile off the
+shaking of chains, traces, and whiffle-trees, and the creaking of its
+leathern braces, as the great bulk swings along piled high with trunks.
+It represents to John, somehow, authority, government, the right of way;
+the driver is an autocrat, everybody must make way for the stage-coach.
+It almost satisfies the imagination, this royal vehicle; one can go in
+it to the confines of the world,--to Boston and to Albany.
+
+There were other influences that I daresay contributed to the boy's
+education. I think his imagination was stimulated by a band of gypsies
+who used to come every summer and pitch a tent on a little roadside
+patch of green turf by the river-bank not far from his house. It was
+shaded by elms and butternut-trees, and a long spit of sand and pebbles
+ran out from it into the brawling stream. Probably they were not a very
+good kind of gypsy, although the story was that the men drank and beat
+the women. John didn't know much about drinking; his experience of it
+was confined to sweet cider; yet he had already set himself up as a
+reformer, and joined the Cold Water Band. The object of this Band was to
+walk in a procession under a banner that declared,
+
+     “So here we pledge perpetual hate
+      To all that can intoxicate;”
+
+and wear a badge with this legend, and above it the device of a
+well-curb with a long sweep. It kept John and all the little boys and
+girls from being drunkards till they were ten or eleven years of age;
+though perhaps a few of them died meantime from eating loaf-cake and pie
+and drinking ice-cold water at the celebrations of the Band.
+
+The gypsy camp had a strange fascination for John, mingled of curiosity
+and fear. Nothing more alien could come into the New England life than
+this tatterdemalion band. It was hardly credible that here were actually
+people who lived out-doors, who slept in their covered wagon or under
+their tent, and cooked in the open air; it was a visible romance
+transferred from foreign lands and the remote times of the story-books;
+and John took these city thieves, who were on their annual foray into
+the country, trading and stealing horses and robbing hen-roosts and
+cornfields, for the mysterious race who for thousands of years have done
+these same things in all lands, by right of their pure blood and ancient
+lineage. John was afraid to approach the camp when any of the scowling
+and villainous men were lounging about, pipes in mouth; but he took
+more courage when only women and children were visible. The swarthy,
+black-haired women in dirty calico frocks were anything but attractive,
+but they spoke softly to the boy, and told his fortune, and wheedled him
+into bringing them any amount of cucumbers and green corn in the course
+of the season. In front of the tent were planted in the ground three
+poles that met together at the top, whence depended a kettle. This
+was the kitchen, and it was sufficient. The fuel for the fire was the
+driftwood of the stream. John noted that it did not require to be
+sawed into stove-lengths; and, in short, that the “chores” about this
+establishment were reduced to the minimum. And an older person than John
+might envy the free life of these wanderers, who paid neither rent nor
+taxes, and yet enjoyed all the delights of nature. It seemed to the boy
+that affairs would go more smoothly in the world if everybody would live
+in this simple manner. Nor did he then know, or ever after find out, why
+it is that the world permits only wicked people to be Bohemians.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. A CONTRAST TO THE NEW ENGLAND BOY
+
+One evening at vespers in Genoa, attracted by a burst of music from
+the swinging curtain of the doorway, I entered a little church much
+frequented by the common people. An unexpected and exceedingly pretty
+sight rewarded me.
+
+It was All Souls' Day. In Italy almost every day is set apart for some
+festival, or belongs to some saint or another, and I suppose that when
+leap year brings around the extra day, there is a saint ready to claim
+the 29th of February. Whatever the day was to the elders, the evening
+was devoted to the children. The first thing I noticed was, that the
+quaint old church was lighted up with innumerable wax tapers,--an
+uncommon sight, for the darkness of a Catholic church in the evening
+is usually relieved only by a candle here and there, and by a blazing
+pyramid of them on the high altar. The use of gas is held to be a
+vulgar thing all over Europe, and especially unfit for a church or an
+aristocratic palace.
+
+Then I saw that each taper belonged to a little boy or girl, and the
+groups of children were scattered all about the church. There was a
+group by every side altar and chapel, all the benches were occupied
+by knots of them, and there were so many circles of them seated on the
+pavement that I could with difficulty make my way among them. There
+were hundreds of children in the church, all dressed in their holiday
+apparel, and all intent upon the illumination, which seemed to be a
+private affair to each one of them.
+
+And not much effect had their tapers upon the darkness of the vast
+vaults above them. The tapers were little spiral coils of wax, which the
+children unrolled as fast as they burned, and when they were tired of
+holding them, they rested them on the ground and watched the burning. I
+stood some time by a group of a dozen seated in a corner of the church.
+They had massed all the tapers in the center and formed a ring about the
+spectacle, sitting with their legs straight out before them and their
+toes turned up. The light shone full in their happy faces, and made the
+group, enveloped otherwise in darkness, like one of Correggio's pictures
+of children or angels. Correggio was a famous Italian artist of the
+sixteenth century, who painted cherubs like children who were just going
+to heaven, and children like cherubs who had just come out of it. But
+then, he had the Italian children for models, and they get the knack of
+being lovely very young. An Italian child finds it as easy to be pretty
+as an American child to be good.
+
+One could not but be struck with the patience these little people
+exhibited in their occupation, and the enjoyment they got out of it.
+There was no noise; all conversed in subdued whispers and behaved in the
+most gentle manner to each other, especially to the smallest, and there
+were many of them so small that they could only toddle about by the most
+judicious exercise of their equilibrium. I do not say this by way of
+reproof to any other kind of children.
+
+These little groups, as I have said, were scattered all about the
+church; and they made with their tapers little spots of light, which
+looked in the distance very much like Correggio's picture which is at
+Dresden,--the Holy Family at Night, and the light from the Divine Child
+blazing in the faces of all the attendants. Some of the children were
+infants in the nurses' arms, but no one was too small to have a taper,
+and to run the risk of burning its fingers.
+
+There is nothing that a baby likes more than a lighted candle, and the
+church has understood this longing in human nature, and found means to
+gratify it by this festival of tapers.
+
+The groups do not all remain long in place, you may imagine; there is a
+good deal of shifting about, and I see little stragglers wandering over
+the church, like fairies lighted by fireflies. Occasionally they form
+a little procession and march from one altar to another, their lights
+twinkling as they go.
+
+But all this time there is music pouring out of the organ-loft at the
+end of the church, and flooding all its spaces with its volume. In front
+of the organ is a choir of boys, led by a round-faced and jolly monk,
+who rolls about as he sings, and lets the deep bass noise rumble about a
+long time in his stomach before he pours it out of his mouth. I can see
+the faces of all of them quite well, for each singer has a candle to
+light his music-book.
+
+And next to the monk stands the boy,--the handsomest boy in the whole
+world probably at this moment. I can see now his great, liquid, dark
+eyes, and his exquisite face, and the way he tossed back his long
+waving hair when he struck into his part. He resembled the portraits of
+Raphael, when that artist was a boy; only I think he looked better than
+Raphael, and without trying, for he seemed to be a spontaneous sort of
+boy. And how that boy did sing! He was the soprano of the choir, and he
+had a voice of heavenly sweetness. When he opened his mouth and tossed
+back his head, he filled the church with exquisite melody.
+
+He sang like a lark, or like an angel. As we never heard an angel
+sing, that comparison is not worth much. I have seen pictures of angels
+singing, there is one by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck in the gallery at
+Berlin,--and they open their mouths like this boy, but I can't say as
+much for their singing. The lark, which you very likely never heard
+either, for larks are as scarce in America as angels,--is a bird that
+springs up from the meadow and begins to sing as he rises in a spiral
+flight, and the higher he mounts, the sweeter he sings, until you think
+the notes are dropping out of heaven itself, and you hear him when he
+is gone from sight, and you think you hear him long after all sound has
+ceased.
+
+And yet this boy sang better than a lark, because he had more notes and
+a greater compass and more volume, although he shook out his voice in
+the same gleesome abundance.
+
+I am sorry that I cannot add that this ravishingly beautiful boy was a
+good boy. He was probably one of the most mischievous boys that was ever
+in an organ-loft. All the time that he was singing the vespers he was
+skylarking like an imp. While he was pouring out the most divine melody,
+he would take the opportunity of kicking the shins of the boy next to
+him, and while he was waiting for his part, he would kick out behind at
+any one who was incautious enough to approach him. There never was
+such a vicious boy; he kept the whole loft in a ferment. When the monk
+rumbled his bass in his stomach, the boy cut up monkey-shines that set
+every other boy into a laugh, or he stirred up a row that set them all
+at fisticuffs.
+
+And yet this boy was a great favorite. The jolly monk loved him best
+of all and bore with his wildest pranks. When he was wanted to sing his
+part and was skylarking in the rear, the fat monk took him by the ear
+and brought him forward; and when he gave the boy's ear a twist, the boy
+opened his lovely mouth and poured forth such a flood of melody as you
+never heard. And he did n't mind his notes; he seemed to know his notes
+by heart, and could sing and look off like a nightingale on a bough. He
+knew his power, that boy; and he stepped forward to his stand when he
+pleased, certain that he would be forgiven as soon as he began to sing.
+And such spirit and life as he threw into the performance, rollicking
+through the Vespers with a perfect abandon of carriage, as if he could
+sing himself out of his skin if he liked.
+
+While the little angels down below were pattering about with their wax
+tapers, keeping the holy fire burning, suddenly the organ stopped, the
+monk shut his book with a bang, the boys blew out the candles, and I
+heard them all tumbling down-stairs in a gale of noise and laughter. The
+beautiful boy I saw no more.
+
+About him plays the light of tender memory; but were he twice as lovely,
+I could never think of him as having either the simple manliness or the
+good fortune of the New England boy.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Being a Boy, by Charles Dudley Warner
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