singers' seats in the bare old meeting-houses.

Sunday to the country farmer-boy was hardly the relief that it was to
the other members of the family; for the same chores must be done
that day as on others, and he could not divert his mind with
whistling, hand-springs, or sending the dog into the river after
sticks. He had to submit, in the first place, to the restraint of
shoes and stockings. He read in the Old Testament that when Moses
came to holy ground, he put off his shoes; but the boy was obliged to
put his on, upon the holy day, not only to go to meeting, but while
he sat at home. Only the emancipated country-boy, who is as agile on
his bare feet as a young kid, and rejoices in the pressure of the
warm soft earth, knows what a hardship it is to tie on stiff shoes.
The monks who put peas in their shoes as a penance do not suffer more
than the country-boy in his penitential Sunday shoes. I recall the
celerity with which he used to kick them off at sundown.

Sunday morning was not an idle one for the farmer-boy. He must rise
tolerably early, for the cows were to be milked and driven to
pasture; family prayers were a little longer than on other days;
there were the Sunday-school verses to be relearned, for they did not
stay in mind over night; perhaps the wagon was to be greased before
the neighbors began to drive by; and the horse was to be caught out
of the pasture, ridden home bareback, and harnessed.

This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun
usually, and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been
wanted for taking the family to meeting. It was so peaceful and
still in the pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so
playful, the colts never so frisky. Round and round the lot the boy
went calling, in an entreating Sunday voice, "Jock, jock, jock,
jock," and shaking his salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect,
and shaking tails and flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner,
and gave the boy a pretty good race before he could coax the nose of
one of them into his dish. The boy got angry, and came very near
saying "dum it," but he rather enjoyed the fun, after all.

The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety was divided between the
set of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory
of the Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was
through the house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept
running hither and thither, t