Sunday to the country farmer-boy was hardly the relief that it was to the other members of the family; for the same chores must be done that day as on others, and he could not divert his mind with whistling, hand-springs, or sending the dog into the river after sticks.  He had to submit, in the first place, to the restraint of shoes and stockings.  He read in the Old Testament that when Moses came to holy ground, he put off his shoes; but the boy was obliged to put his on, upon the holy day, not only to go to meeting, but while he sat at home.  Only the emancipated country-boy, who is as agile on his bare feet as a young kid, and rejoices in the pressure of the warm soft earth, knows what a hardship it is to tie on stiff shoes.  The monks who put peas in their shoes as a penance do not suffer more than the country-boy in his penitential Sunday shoes.  I recall the celerity with which he used to kick them off at sundown.

Sunday morning was not an idle one for the farmer-boy.  He must rise tolerably early, for the cows were to be milked and driven to pasture; family prayers were a little longer than on other days; there were the Sunday-school verses to be relearned, for they did not stay in mind over night; perhaps the wagon was to be greased before the neighbors began to drive by; and the horse was to be caught out of the pasture, ridden home bareback, and harnessed.

This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun usually, and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been wanted for taking the family to meeting.  It was so peaceful and still in the pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so playful, the colts never so frisky.  Round and round the lot the boy went calling, in an entreating Sunday voice, “Jock, jock, jock, jock,” and shaking his salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect, and shaking tails and flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and gave the boy a pretty good race before he could coax the nose of one of them into his dish.  The boy got angry, and came very near saying “dum it,” but he rather enjoyed the fun, after all.

The boy remembers how his mother’s anxiety was divided between the set of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory of the Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was through the house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept running hither and thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch of caraway-seed.  Already the deacon’s mare, with a wagon-load of the deacon’s folks, had gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up clouds of dust, while the good deacon sat jerking the reins, in an automatic way, and the “womenfolks” patiently saw the dust settle upon their best summer finery.  Wagon after wagon went along the sandy road, and when our boy’s family started, they became part of a long procession, which sent up a