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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Being a Boy, by Charles D. Warner
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+Title: Being a Boy
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+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: March, 2002  [Etext #3127]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Being a Boy, by Charles D. Warner
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+4warn10.txt or 4warn10.zip
+
+
+
+
+Being a Boy
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+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 be 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 profiination 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 1pit.  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 Etext of Being a Boy, by Charles D. Warner
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Being a Boy, by C. D. Warner
+#31 in our series by Charles Dudley Warner
+
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+Title: Being a Boy
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+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Being a Boy, by C. D. Warner
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+
+
+BEING A BOY
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+NOTE: This work has been previously published in [Etext #2674]
+The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Volume 4,
+Project Gutenberg The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner
+4warn10.txt or 4warn10.zip
+
+
+
+
+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 be 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 this Project Gutenberg Etext of Being a Boy
+by Charles Dudley Warner
+
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