and to browse, the fragrant wintergreens and a hundred nameless adventures, all strung upon that brief journey of half a mile to and from the remote pastures.  Sometimes a cow or two will be missing when the herd is brought home at night; then to hunt them up is another adventure.  My grandfather went out one night to look up an absentee from the yard, when he heard something in the brush, and out stepped a bear into the path before him.

Every Sunday morning the cows were salted.  The farm-boy would take a pail with three or four quarts of coarse salt, and, followed by the eager herd, go to the field and deposit the salt in handfuls upon smooth stones and rocks and upon clean places on the turf.  If you want to know how good salt is, see a cow eat it.  She gives the true saline smack.  How she dwells upon it, and gnaws the sward and licks the stones where it has been deposited!  The cow is the most delightful feeder among animals.  It makes one’s mouth water to see her eat pumpkins, and to see her at a pile of apples is distracting.  How she sweeps off the delectable grass!  The sound of her grazing is appetizing; the grass betrays all its sweetness and succulency in parting under her sickle.

The region of which I write abounds in sheep also.  Sheep love high, cool, breezy lands.  Their range is generally much above that of cattle.  Their sharp noses will find picking where a cow would fare poorly indeed.  Hence most farmers utilize their high, wild, and mountain lands by keeping a small flock of sheep.  But they are the outlaws of the farm and are seldom within bounds.  They make many lively expeditions for the farm-boy,—­driving them out of mischief, hunting them up in the mountains, or salting them on the breezy hills.  Then there is the annual sheep-washing, when on a warm day in May or early June the whole herd is driven a mile or more to a suitable pool in the creek, and one by one doused and washed and rinsed in the water.  We used to wash below an old grist-mill, and it was a pleasing spectacle,—­the mill, the dam, the overhanging rocks and trees, the round, deep pool, and the huddled and frightened sheep.

One of the features of farm life peculiar to this country, and one of the most picturesque of them all, is sugar-making in the maple woods in spring.  This is the first work of the season, and to the boys is more play than work.  In the Old World, and in more simple and imaginative times, how such an occupation as this would have got into literature, and how many legends and associations would have clustered around it!  It is woodsy, and savors of the trees; it is an encampment among the maples.  Before the bud swells, before the grass springs, before the plow is started, comes the sugar harvest.  It is the sequel of the bitter frost; a sap-run is the sweet good-by of winter.  It denotes a certain equipoise of the season; the heat of the day fully balances the frost of the night.  In New York and New England,