The truth is, that boys have always been so plenty that they are not half appreciated.  We have shown that a farm could not get along without them, and yet their rights are seldom recognized.  One of the most amusing things is their effort to acquire personal property.  The boy has the care of the calves; they always need feeding, or shutting up, or letting out; when the boy wants to play, there are those calves to be looked after,—­until he gets to hate the name of calf.  But in consideration of his faithfulness, two of them are given to him.  There is no doubt that they are his:  he has the entire charge of them.  When they get to be steers he spends all his holidays in breaking them in to a yoke.  He gets them so broken in that they will run like a pair of deer all over the farm, turning the yoke, and kicking their heels, while he follows in full chase, shouting the ox language till he is red in the face.  When the steers grow up to be cattle, a drover one day comes along and takes them away, and the boy is told that he can have another pair of calves; and so, with undiminished faith, he goes back and begins over again to make his fortune.  He owns lambs and young colts in the same way, and makes just as much out of them.

There are ways in which the farmer-boy can earn money, as by gathering the early chestnuts and taking them to the corner store, or by finding turkeys’ eggs and selling them to his mother; and another way is to go without butter at the table—­but the money thus made is for the heathen.  John read in Dr. Livingstone that some of the tribes in Central Africa (which is represented by a blank spot in the atlas) use the butter to grease their hair, putting on pounds of it at a time; and he said he had rather eat his butter than have it put to that use, especially as it melted away so fast in that hot climate.

Of course it was explained to John that the missionaries do not actually carry butter to Africa, and that they must usually go without it themselves there, it being almost impossible to make it good from the milk in the cocoanuts.  And it was further explained to him that even if the heathen never received his butter or the money for it, it was an excellent thing for a boy to cultivate the habit of self-denial and of benevolence, and if the heathen never heard of him, he would be blessed for his generosity.  This was all true.

But John said that he was tired of supporting the heathen out of his butter, and he wished the rest of the family would also stop eating butter and save the money for missions; and he wanted to know where the other members of the family got their money to send to the heathen; and his mother said that he was about half right, and that self-denial was just as good for grown people as it was for little boys and girls.