I wish the journey would never end; but at last, by noon, we reach the pastures and turn in the herd; and after making the tour of the lots to make sure there are no breaks in the fences, we take our luncheon from the wagon and eat it under the trees by the spring.  This is the supreme moment of the day.  This is the way to live; this is like the Swiss Family Robinson, and all the rest of my delightful acquaintances in romance.  Baked beans, rye-and-indian bread (moist, remember), doughnuts and cheese, pie, and root beer.  What richness!  You may live to dine at Delmonico’s, or, if those Frenchmen do not eat each other up, at Philippe’s, in Rue Montorgueil in Paris, where the dear old Thackeray used to eat as good a dinner as anybody; but you will get there neither doughnuts, nor pie, nor root beer, nor anything so good as that luncheon at noon in the old pasture, high among the Massachusetts hills!  Nor will you ever, if you live to be the oldest boy in the world, have any holiday equal to the one I have described.  But I always regretted that I did not take along a fishline, just to “throw in” the brook we passed.  I know there were trout there.

IV

NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY

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

It is understood, in the first place, that he is to do all the errands, to go to the store, to the post office, and to carry all sorts of messages.  If he had as many legs as a centipede, they would tire before night.  His two short limbs seem to him entirely inadequate to the task.  He would like to have as many legs as a wheel has spokes, and rotate about in the same way.  This he sometimes tries to do; and people who have seen him “turning cart-wheels” along the side of the road have supposed that he was amusing himself, and idling his time; he was only trying to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he could economize his legs and do his errands with greater dispatch.  He practices standing on his head, in order to accustom himself to any position.  Leapfrog is one of his methods of getting over the ground quickly.  He would willingly go an errand any distance if he could leap-frog it with a few other boys.  He has a natural genius for combining pleasure with business.  This is the reason why, when he