old pasture, high
among the Massachusetts hills! Nor will you ever, if you live to be
the oldest boy in the world, have any holiday equal to the one I have
described. But I always regretted that I did not take along a
fishline, just to "throw in" the brook we 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