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. Jus