There are so many bright spots in the life of a farm-boy, that I sometimes think I should like to live the life over again; I should almost be willing to be a girl if it were not for the chores.  There is a great comfort to a boy in the amount of work he can get rid of doing.  It is sometimes astonishing how slow he can go on an errand, —­he who leads the school in a race.  The world is new and interesting to him, and there is so much to take his attention off, when he is sent to do anything.  Perhaps he himself couldn’t explain why, when he is sent to the neighbor’s after yeast, he stops to stone the frogs; he is not exactly cruel, but he wants to see if he can hit ’em.  No other living thing can go so slow as a boy sent on an errand.  His legs seem to be lead, unless he happens to espy a woodchuck in an adjoining lot, when he gives chase to it like a deer; and it is a curious fact about boys, that two will be a great deal slower in doing anything than one, and that the more you have to help on a piece of work the less is accomplished.  Boys have a great power of helping each other to do nothing; and they are so innocent about it, and unconscious.  “I went as quick as ever I could,” says the boy:  his father asks him why he did n’t stay all night, when he has been absent three hours on a ten-minute errand.  The sarcasm has no effect on the boy.

Going after the cows was a serious thing in my day.  I had to climb a hill, which was covered with wild strawberries in the season.  Could any boy pass by those ripe berries?  And then in the fragrant hill pasture there were beds of wintergreen with red berries, tufts of columbine, roots of sassafras to be dug, and dozens of things good to eat or to smell, that I could not resist.  It sometimes even lay in my way to climb a tree to look for a crow’s nest, or to swing in the top, and to try if I could see the steeple of the village church.  It became very important sometimes for me to see that steeple; and in the midst of my investigations the tin horn would blow a great blast from the farmhouse, which would send a cold chill down my back in the hottest days.  I knew what it meant.  It had a frightfully impatient quaver in it, not at all like the sweet note that called us to dinner from the hay-field.  It said, “Why on earth does n’t that boy come home?  It is almost dark, and the cows ain’t milked!” And that was the time the cows had to start into a brisk pace and make up for lost time.  I wonder if any boy ever drove the cows home late, who did not say that the cows were at the very farther end of the pasture, and that “Old Brindle” was hidden in the woods, and he couldn’t find her for ever so long!  The brindle cow is the boy’s scapegoat, many a time.