five or six, in the
old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times a
day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood in a
perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and consonants
stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by one, by
continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember, to distinguish
_b_ from _d_, and _c_ from _e_. When and how I learned to read I do not
remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later Olney's Geography,
and then Dayballs Arithmetic.

I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm, say
at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined to the
winters.

(Illustration of The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by M.H. Fanning)

As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in the
maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought me near to
wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm work. Then I soon
managed to gather a little harvest of my own from the sugar bush. I used
to anticipate the general tapping by a few days or a week, and tap a few
trees on my own account along the sunny border of the Woods, and boil
the sap down on the kitchen stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks),
selling the sugar in the village. I think the first money I ever earned
came to me in this way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought
with some of this precious money. When I appeared in the village with my
basket of small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and
call after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so
early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for sugar,
and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in the face of
my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own eyes upon them.
I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money as that was I should
become a miser.

Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery, and
haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way off;
picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited my hands and
my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in the spring meadows
with my long-handled knocker, about the time the first swallow was heard
laughing overhead, was real fun. I always wanted some element of play in
my work; buckling down to any sort of routine always galled me, and does
yet.