then dropping like a stone.
How hard-hearted we soon get! It used to worry me. Now I gather 'em up
as though they were so many chips and toss them into the wagon-box; or
into my school-bag, if it's a private expedition of only Paddy and me.
And that's the way life treats us, too.

I've been practising on the gophers with my new gun, and with
Dinky-Dunk's .22 rifle. A gopher is only a little bigger than a
chipmunk, and usually pokes nothing more than his head out of his hole,
so when I got thirteen out of fifteen shots I began to feel that I was a
sharp-shooter. But don't regard this as wanton cruelty, for the gopher
is worse than a rat, and in this country the government agents supply
homesteaders with an annual allowance of free strychnine to poison them
off.

_Sunday the Eleventh_

I've made my first butter, be it recorded--but in doing so I managed to
splash the ceiling and the walls and my own woolly head, for I didn't
have sense enough to tie a wet cloth about the handle of the
churn-dasher until the damage had been done. I was too intent on getting
my butter to pay attention to details, though it took a disheartening
long time and my arms were tired out before I had finished. And when I
saw myself spattered from head to foot it reminded me of what you once
said about me and my reading, that I had the habit of coming out of a
book like a spaniel out of water, scattering ideas as I came. But there
are not many new books in my life these days. It is mostly hard work,
although I reminded Dinky-Dunk last night that while Omar intimated that
love and bread and wine were enough for any wilderness, we mustn't
forget that he also included a book of verses underneath the bough! My
lord says that by next year we can line our walls with books. But I'm
like Moses on Mount Nebo--I can see my promised land, but it seems a
terribly long way off. But this, as Dinky-Dunk would say, is not the
spirit that built Rome, and has carried me away from my butter, the
making of which cold-creamed my face until I looked as though I had snow
on my headlight. Yet there is real joy in finding those lovely yellow
granules in the bottom of your churn and then working it over and over
with a saucer in a cooking-bowl until it is one golden mass. Several
times before I'd shaken up sour cream in a sealer, but this was my first
real butter-making. I have just discovered, however, that I didn't
"wash" it enough, so that all the buttermilk wa