IV.  THE GRANDFATHER.

Charles G. Eastman (b. 1816, d.1861) was born in Maine, but removed at an early age to Vermont, where he was connected with the press at Burlington, Woodstock, and Montpelier.  He published a volume of poems in 1848, written in a happy lyric and ballad style, and faithfully portraying rural life in New England.

1.  The farmer sat in his easy-chair
     Smoking his pipe of clay,
   While his hale old wife with busy care,
     Was clearing the dinner away;
   A sweet little girl with fine blue eyes,
   On her grandfather’s knee, was catching flies.

2.  The old man laid his hand on her head,
     With a tear on his wrinkled face,
   He thought how often her mother, dead,
     Had sat in the selfsame place;
   As the tear stole down from his half-shut eye,
   “Don’t smoke!” said the child, “how it makes you cry!”

3.  The house dog lay stretched out on the floor,
     Where the shade, afternoons, used to steal;
   The busy old wife by the open door
     Was turning the spinning wheel,
   And the old brass clock on the manteltree
   Had plodded along to almost three.

4.  Still the farmer sat in his easy-chair,
     While close to his heaving breast
   The moistened brow and the cheek so fair
     Of his sweet grandchild were pressed;
   His head bent down, all her soft hair lay;
   Fast asleep were they both on that summer day.

Definitions.—­1.  Hale, healthy. 3.  Man’tel-tree, shelf over a fireplace. 
Plod’ded, went slowly. 4.  Heaving, rising and falling.

V. A BOY ON A FARM.

Charles Dudley Warner (b. 1829,—­) was born at Plainfield, Mass.  In 1851 he graduated at Hamilton College, and in 1856 was admitted to the bar at Philadelphia, but moved to Chicago to practice his profession.  There he remained until 1860, when he became connected with the press at Hartford, Conn., and has ever since devoted himself to literature.  “My Summer in a Garden,” “Saunterings,” and “Backlog Studies” are his best known works.  The following extract is from “Being a Boy.”

1.  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.

2.  After everybody else is through, he has to finish up.  His work is like a woman’s,—­perpetually 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.