This garden John has no fondness for.  He would rather hoe corn all day than work in it.  Father seems to think that it is easy work that John can do, because it is near the house!  John’s continual plan in this life is to go fishing.  When there comes a rainy day, he attempts to carry it out.  But ten chances to one his father has different views.  As it rains so that work cannot be done out-doors, it is a good time to work in the garden.  He can run into the house between the heavy showers.  John accordingly detests the garden; and the only time he works briskly in it is when he has a stent set, to do so much weeding before the Fourth of July.  If he is spry, he can make an extra holiday the Fourth and the day after.  Two days of gunpowder and ball-playing!  When I was a boy, I supposed there was some connection between such and such an amount of work done on the farm and our national freedom.  I doubted if there could be any Fourth of July if my stent was not done.  I, at least, worked for my Independence.

III

THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING

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