have been sworn comrades
to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other
points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served
admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter
was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright
stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor
habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest
homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan
recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "--which as
Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to
astonish the women-folks.
After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if
they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak
with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite
gone by breakfast-time.
To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive
them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their
conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the
cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked
over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the
wrong side, and partly because, taking offence at the whisking of their
tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with
one hand and milking with the other. They further averred that we hoed
up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth
carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five hundred tufts of
burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful
planting few of our seeds ever came up at all, or, if they did come up,
it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the better part of the month
of June in reversing a field of beans, which had thrust themselves out
of the ground in this unseemly way. They quoted it as nothing more
than an ordinary occurrence for one or o
|