ent 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 he 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 investiga