but nutting is the poetry, of farm life. I am not
sure but the boy would find it very irksome, though, if he were
obliged to work at nut-gathering in order to procure food for the
family. He is willing to make himself useful in his own way. The
Italian boy, who works day after day at a huge pile of pine-cones,
pounding and cracking them and taking out the long seeds, which are
sold and eaten as we eat nuts (and which are almost as good as
pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the Italians), probably does not
see the fun of nutting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy here were set at
pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening the prickly chestnut-burs
as a task, he would think himself an ill-used boy. What a hardship
the prickles in his fingers would be! But now he digs them out with
his jack-knife, and enjoys the process, on the whole. The boy is
willing to do any amount of work if it is called play.

In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble and industrious than the
boy. I like to see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove; they
leave a desert behind them like the seventeen-year locusts. To climb
a tree and shake it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit, and pass
to the next, is the sport of a brief time. I have seen a legion of
boys scamper over our grass-plot under the chestnut-trees, each one
as active as if he were a new patent picking-machine, sweeping the
ground clean of nuts, and disappear over the hill before I could go
to the door and speak to them about it. Indeed, I have noticed that
boys don't care much for conversation with the owners of fruit-trees.
They could speedily make their fortunes if they would work as rapidly
in cotton-fields. I have never seen anything like it, except a flock
of turkeys removing the grasshoppers from a piece of pasture.

Perhaps it is not generally known that we get the idea of some of our
best military maneuvers from the turkey. The deploying of the
skirmish-line in advance of an army is one of them. The drum-major
of our holiday militia companies is copied exactly from the turkey
gobbler; he has the same splendid appearance, the same proud step,
and the same martial aspect. The gobbler does not lead his forces in
the field, but goes behind them, like the colonel of a regiment, so
that he can see every part of the line and direct its movements.
This resemblance is one of the most singular things in natural
history. I like to watch the gobbler maneuvering his forces in a
grassho