 Part 4 of The Farmer's Boy by Clifton Johnson This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read for you by Chiquito Crasto. Part 4, Autumn By September you begin to find dashes of color among the upland trees. It is some weakling bush perhaps so poorly nourished, or by chance injured, that it must shorten its year and burn out, thus early, its meagre foliage. But as soon as you see these pale flames among the greens, you feel that the year has passed its prime. Grown people may experience a touch of melancholy with the approach of autumn. The years fly fast, another of those allotted them is almost gone. The brightening foliage is a presage of bare twigs, of frost and frozen earth, and the gales and snows of winter. This is not the boy's view. He is not retrospective. His interests are bound up in the present and the future. There is a good deal of unconscious wisdom in this mental attitude. He looks forward, whatever the time of year, with unflagging enthusiasm to the days approaching, and he rejoices in what he sees in experiences, for what these things then are, and does not worry himself with allegories. The bright-leaved tree at the end of summer is a matter of interest, both for its brightness and its unexpectedness. The boy will pick a branch and take it home to show his mother, and the next day he will carry it to school and give it to the teacher. He would be glad to share all the good things of life that come to him with his teacher. Next to his mother, she is the best person he knows of. He never finds anything in his wanderings about home or in the fields or woods that is curious or beautiful or good to eat, but that the thought of the teacher flashes into his mind. His intentions are better than his ability to carry them out, for he often forgets himself and eats all the berries he picked on the way home, or he gets tired and throws away the treasures he has gathered. But what he does take to the teacher is sure of a welcome and an interest that makes him happy, and more her faithful follower than ever. Summer merges so gently into autumn that it is hard to tell where to draw the line of separation. September as a rule is a month of mild days mingled with some that have all the heat of mid-summer, but the nights are cooler, and the dew feels icy cold to the boy's bare feet at times on his morning trips to and from pasture. But if you notice the fields closely, you will see that many changes are coming in to mark the season. The meadows are being clipped of their second crop of grass. The potato tops have withered and lost themselves in the motley masses of green weeds that continue to flourish after they have ripened. The loaded apple trees droop their branches and sprinkle the earth with early fallen fruit. The coarse grasses and woody creepers along the fences turn rustic and crimson, and the garden becomes increasingly ragged and forlorn. The garden reached its fullness and began to go to pieces in July. First among its summer treasures came a green cucumber, then peas and sweet corn, and string beans and early potatoes. The boy had a great deal more to do with these things than he liked, for the gathering of them was among those small jobs it is so handy to call on the boy to do. However, he got not a little consolation out of it by eating of the things he gathered. Raw string beans were not at all bad, and a pod full of peas made a pleasant and juicy mouthful, while a small ear of sweet corn or a stalk of rhubarb or an onion, and even a green cucumber, could be used to vary the bill of fare. Along one side of the garden was a row of current bushes. He was supposed to let those mostly alone. As his mother had warned him, she wanted them for jelly. But he did not interpret her warning so literally, but that he allowed himself to rejoice his palate with an occasional full cluster. It was when the tomatoes ripened that the garden reached the top notch in its offering of raw delicacies. Those red, full-skinned trophies fairly melted in the boy's mouth. He liked them better than green apples. The potatoes were the hardest things to manage of all the garden vegetables he was sent out to gather for dinner. His folks had an idea that you could dig into the sides of the hills and pull out the big potatoes and then cover up and let the rest keep on growing. But when the boy tried this and had done with a hill, he had to acknowledge that it didn't look as if it would ever amount to much afterward. The sweet corn stalks from which the years were picked had to be cut from time to time and fed to the cows. It was distinning out of the corn as much as the withering of the pea and cucumber vines and irregular digging of the potatoes that gave the garden its early forlorness. By August, the pasture grass had been cropped short by the cows and the drier slopes had withered into brown. Henceforth it was deemed necessary to furnish the cows extra feed from other sources of supply. The farmer would mow with his scythe on many evenings in the nooks and corners about his buildings or along the roadside and in the lanes and the results of these small mowings were left for the boy to bring in on his wheelbarrow. Another source of fodder supply was the field of Indian corn. Around the bases of the hills there sprouted up many surplus shoots of a foot or two in length known as suckers. These were of no earthly use where they were and the boy on a small farm had often the privilege of an afternoon of cutting a load of these suckers for the cows. Among them he gathered a good many full grown stalks that had no years on them. Later there was a whole patch of fodder corn sown in furrows on some piece of laid plowed ground to gather from. He had to bring in as heavy a load as he could wheel every night and on Saturday an extra one to last over Sunday. The cows had to have attention one way or another the year through. They were most aggravating. Perhaps when in September the shortness of feed in the pasture made them covetous of the contents of the neighbouring fields. Sometimes the boy would cite them in the corn. His first great anxiety was not about the corn but as to whether they were his folks cows or some of the neighbours. He would much rather warn someone else than undertake the cow chasing himself. If his study of the colour and spotting of the cows proved they were his he went in and told his mother then got his stick and took a beeline across the fields. He was wrathfully inclined when he started and he became much more so when he found out how much disposed the cows were to keep tearing around in the corn or to racing about the fields in as many different directions as there were animals. He and the rest of the school had lately become members of the band of mercy and on ordinary occasions he had a kindly feeling for his cows but now he was ready to throw all sentiment overboard and he would break his stick over the back of any one of these cows if she would give him the chance which she very unkindly would not. He had lost his temper and now he lost his breath and he just dripped with perspiration. He dragged himself along at a panting walk and he found after all that this did fully as well as all the racing and shouting he had been indulging in. Indeed he was not sure whether the cows had got the notion that he had come out to have a little caper over the farm with them for his personal enjoyment. All things have an end and in time the boy made the last cow leap the cap in the broken fence back into the pasture. They everyone went to browsing as if nothing had happened or looked at him mildly with an inquiring forward tilt of the ears as if they wanted to know what all this row was about anyway. The boy put back the knocked down rails, staked things up as well as he knew how, picked some peppermint by the brook to munch on and trudged off home. When he had drunk a quart or so of water and eaten three cookies he began to feel himself again. Besides all the extra forduring mentioned it is customary on the small farms to give the cows late in the year an hour or two's baiting each day. The cows are baited along the roadside at first but after the roving is cut they are allowed to roam about the grass fields. Of course it is the boy who has to watch them. There are unfenced crops and the apples that lie thick under the trees to be guarded not to mention the turnips in the newly seeded lot and the cabbages on the hill that will spoil the milk if the cows get them. The boundary line fences too are out of repair and the cows seem to have a great anxiety to get over on the neighbors premises even if the feed is much scantier than in the field where they are feeding. The boy brings out a book and he settles himself with his back against a fence post and plans for an easy time. The cows seem to understand the situation and they go exploring round as the boy says in the most sensible fashion he ever saw wouldn't keep nowhere nor anywhere else. He tries to make them stay within bounds by yelling at them while sitting where he is but they do not seem to care the least bit about his remarks unless he is right behind them with a stick in his hand. The cows do not allow the boy to suffer for lack of exercise and the hero in the book he is reading has continually to be deserted in the most desperate situations while he runs off to give those cows a training. There is one of the cows relations that the boy has a particular fondness for. I mean the calf. On small farms the lone summer calf is tethered handily about the premises somewhere out of those. Every day or two when it has nibbed and troddened the circuit of grass in its tether pretty thoroughly it is moved to a fresh spot. The boy does this and he feeds the calf its milk each night and morning. If the calf is very young it does not know enough to drink and the boy has to dip its fingers in the milk and let the calf suck them while he entices it by gradually lowering his hand to put its nose in the pale. When he gets his hand into the milk and the calf imagines it is getting lots of milk out of the boy's fingers he will gently withdraw them. The calf is inclined to resent this by giving a vigorous buck with his head. Very likely the boy gets slopped but he knows well enough what to expect not to allow himself to be sent sprawling. He repeats the finger process until in time the calf will drink alone but he never can get it to stop bucking. Indeed he does not try very hard except occasionally for he finds this butting rather entertaining and sometimes he does not object to butting his own head against the calves. He and the calf cut many a caper together before the summer is through. Things become most exciting when the calf gets loose. It will go galloping all about the premises. It has no regard for the garden or the flower plants or the linen laid out on the grass to dry. It makes the chickens squawk and scamper and the turkeys gobble and the geese gabble. Its heels go kicking through the air in all sorts of positions. Its tail is elevated like a flag ball and there is a rattling chain hitch to its neck that is jerking along in its company. The calf is liable to step on this chain and then it stands on its head with a marvellous suddenness. The women and girls all come out to save their linen and shoe the calf off when it approaches the flowers but it is the boy that takes on himself the task of capturing the crazy animal. The women folks seem much distressed by the calf's performance while the boy is so overcome with the funniness of his calf that he's only halfway effective in his chasing. At last the calf apparently sees something it never noted before for it comes down on its full legs stalks still and stretches its years forward as if in great amazement. Now is the boy's chance. He steals up and grabs the end of the chain but at that moment the calf concludes that it sees nothing worthy of astonishment and starts off again full-tailed trailing a small boy behind whose twinkling legs never spent so fast before and it is a question if things are not in a more desperate state than they were previously. By this time the boy's father and a few of the neighbor's boys appear on the scene and between them all the calf gets confused and allows himself to be tethered once more in the most docile subjection. You would not think the gentle little creature who is so mildly nibbling off the clover leaves was capable of such wild doings. On farms where oxen are the boy is allowed to bring up and train a pair of steers. While the training is going on you can hear the boy shouting out his threats and commands from one end of the town to the other. Even old Grandpa Smith who has been deaf as a stone these 10 years asked what the noise was about when our boy began training steers. By dint of his shouting and whacking it was no great time before the boy had the steers so that they were quite respectable. He got them so they would turn and twist according to his directions almost anyway and he could make them snake the clumsy old cart he hitched them into over any sort of country he pleased. He trained them so they would trot quite well too. Altogether he was proud of them and believed they would beat any steers in the county clean out of sight. He was going to take them to the cattle show sometime and see if they would not. Cattle show comes in the autumn usually about the time of the first frost. There is some very early rising among the farmers on the morning of the great day for they must get their flocks underweaved promptly or they will be late. Every kind of farm creature has its place on the grounds and in the big hall are displayed quantities of fruits and vegetables that are the biggest and best ever seen and samples of cooking and samples of sewing and a bed quilt that an old lady made after she was 90 years old that has about a million pieces in it and another one that Anne Maria Totkins made who is only 10 years old that has about 900,000 pieces in it and a picture in oils that the same Anne Maria Totkins painted and some other paintings and lots of fancy things and all sorts of remarkable work that women and girls can do and a boy isn't good for anything at. However the boy admires all this handiwork and is astonished at the big squash that grew in one summer and weighs twice as much as he does and surveys the fruits with watery mouth and exclaims when he gets to the potatoes any one of which would almost fill a quart measure. Jiminy wouldn't those be the fellas to pick up though? I don't think you use very nice language says Eddie's older sister who is nearly through the high school. Well you don't know much about picking up potatoes is Eddie's retort. There are more chances to spend money than you can shake a stick at on the cattle show grounds all sorts of men are walking around through the crowd with popcorn and candies and gay little balloons and whistles and such things to sell and there are boots where you can see how much you can pound and how much you can lift and how straight you can throw an egg at a nigger's head stuck through a canvas two rods away. There are shooting galleries and there is a phonograph where you tuck some little tubes into your ears and hear the famous baritone August William de Monk sing the latest songs and it is so funny you cannot help laughing. Of course the boy cannot invest in all the things he sees at the fair. He has to stop when his pocket money runs out but there is lots of free fun such as a chance to roam around and look on at everything and he has quantities of hand bills and brightly colored cards and pamphlets thrust upon him all of which he faithfully stores away in his gradually bulging pockets and takes home to consider at leisure. For a number of days afterward he squeaks about in his journeyings with his whistles and Jew harps and other noisemakers purchased at the fair with great persistency but these things soon get broken and the pamphlets and circulars he gathered get scattered and the occasion may be said to have been brought to an end by his finding two Sundays later a lone peanut in his jacket pocket. It was in church time and he was at great pains to crack it quietly so that he could eat it at once. He succeeded though he had to assume great innocence and a remarkably steadfast interest in the preacher when his mother glanced his way suspiciously as she heard the shucks crush. Autumn is a time of harvest. The potato field has first attention when the boy's father is otherwise busy he has to go out alone and do digging and all unless he can persuade his smaller brothers and sisters to bring along their little express wagon in assist. In such a case he spends about half his time showing them how and offering inducements to keep them at work. Usually it is the men folks who dig and the boy who has to do most of the picking up. After he has handled about five bushels of the dirty things he has had enough of it but he cannot desert. It is one of the great virtues of farm life that the boy must learn to do disagreeable tasks and to stick to them in the finish however irksome they are. It gives the right kind of boy a decided advantage in the battles of life that come later whatever his field of industry. He has the courage to undertake and persistence to carry out plans that boys of milder experience will never dare to cope with. Potato fields that have been neglected in the drive of other work in their ripening weeks flourish often at digging time with many weedy jungle. This made digging slow but the economical small farmer saw some gain in the fact for he could feed the weeds to the pigs. After the midday digging while the boy's father was carrying the bags of potatoes down cellar the boy wheeled in a few loads of the weeds. The pigs were very glad to come following up from the barnyard mire to the bars where the boy threw the weeds over. They grunted and crunched with great satisfaction. When the boy brought in the last load he had a little conversation with the pigs and he scratched the fattest ones back with a piece of board until the stout poker lay down on its side and curled up the corner of its mouth and grunted as if in the seventh heaven of bliss. A little later in the fall the onions have to be topped, the beets pulled, the carrots spaded out and the corn cut. Work at the corn in one shape or another hangs on until snow flies. The men do most of the cutting and binding though the boy often assists but what he is sure to do is to drop the straw and to hand up the bundles when they are ready for stacking and gather the scattered pumpkins and put them under the stacks to protect them from the frost. He likes to play that these stacks are Indian tents and he will crowd himself in among their slanting stalks tillies out of sight. He picks out one or two good sized green pumpkins that night from among those that they have brought home to feed to the cows and hollows them out and cuts awful faces on them for jack-o-lanterns. He fixes with considerable trouble a place in the bottom for a candle and gets the younger children to come out on the steps while he lights up. They are filled with delight and fright by the ghostly heads with their strangely glowing features and their grinning saw-toothed mouths. The boy goes sailing around the yard with them and puts them on fence posts and carries them up a ladder and cuts up all sorts of antics with them. Finally the younger children are called in and the boy gets lonesome and blows out his candle and puts the jack-o-lanterns away for another occasion. On days following there is much corn husking in the fields which the boy assists at though the breaking off of the tough cobs is often no easy matter and it makes his wrists and fingers ache. Towards sundown the farmer frequently brings home a load to husk in the evening and for the morrow's work should the day chance to be rainy. In the autumn it is quite common to do an hour or two's work in the barn of an evening though the boy does not fancy the arrangement much and begs off when he can think of a good excuse. In October the apples have to be picked. The pickers go to the orchard armed with baskets, ropes and ladders and the wagon brings out a load of barrels and scatters them about among the trees. It looks dangerous the way the boy will worm about among the branches and purse you the apples out to the tips of the smallest limbs. He never falls though he many times comes near it. The way he hangs on seems to confirm the truth of the theory that he was descended from monkey ancestors but the boy is on the ground much of the time emptying the baskets the men let down into battles and picking up the best of the windfalls and gathering the rest of the apples on the ground into heaps for cider. It is a treat to take the cider apples to mill. There is always something going on there always other teams and other boys and great bins of waiting apples and creaking machinery and an atmosphere full of cidery odors. The boy loses no time in hunting up a good straw and finding a newly filled battle with the bung out. He establishes prompt connections with the cider by means of the straw and fills himself up with sweetness. When he has enough and has wiped his mouth with the sleeve he remarks that he guesses he has lowered the cider some. When they brought their own cider home and propped up the barrels in the yard next to the shop the boy kept a bunch of straws conveniently stored and as long as he called the cider sweet he frequently drew on the barrel's contents. When the cider grew hard he took to visiting the apple bins more frequently and if you noticed him closely you would almost always see that he has bunches in his pockets that showed that he was well provided with these food stores. The great day of the fall for the boy was that on which he and a lot of other fellows went chestnutting. They had been planning it and talking it over for a week beforehand. The sun had not been long up when they started off across the frosty quiet of the pastures. Some had tin pales, some had bags, some had both. One boy had hopes so high that he carried three bags that would hold half a bushel each. Most of them had salt bags that would contain two or three quarts. Several carried clubs to knock off the chestnuts that still clung in the burrs. They were all in eager chatter as they tramped and skipped and climbed the fences and rolled stones down the hillside and whirled their pales about their heads and waited for the smallest boy who was getting left behind to catch up and did all those other things that boys do when they are off that way. How they raced to be first when they neared the chestnut trees. There was a scattering and a shouting over fines and a rustling among the fallen leaves. The nuts were not so numerous that it took them long to clear the ground. Then they threw their clubs but the limbs were too high for their strength to be effective and they soon gave up and went on to find more trees. The chestnuts rattled on the bottoms of their tin pales and the boys with bags twisted them up and exhibited to each other the knobs of nuts within. As the sun rose higher the grass became wet with melted frost and the wind began to blow in dashing little breezes that kept increasing in force till the whole wood was set to singing and fluttering. The boys enjoyed the bristness of the gale and agreed besides that it would bring down the chestnuts. They wandered on over knolls and through hollows sometimes in the brown pastures, sometimes in the ragged autumn forest patches. They clubbed and climbed and picked and bruised their shins and got chestnut burp prickles into their fingers and they had some squabbles among themselves and the smallest boy tumbled and got the nosebleed and shared tears and it took the whole company to comfort him. On the whole though they got on very well. At noon the biggest boy who had a watch told them it was 12 o'clock and they stopped on the sunny side of a pine grove where there was a brook that slipped down over some rocks nearby and at their dinner. The wind was whistling and swaying high up among the pine tops and now and then a tiny whirlwind caught up the leaves beyond the brook and dashed them into a white birch thicket. In the sheltered nook where the boys sat the wind barely touched them and they ate and drank from the brook and lounged about afterward in great comfort. They followed the little stream down a rough ravine where they again started and went through the same experiences as those of the morning. They saw two gray squirrels, they heard a hound baying on the mountain and there was a gun fired off somewhere in the woods. They found a gross nest only it was so high in a tree they could not get it and they picked up many pretty stones by the side of the brook that they put in with their chestnuts. They got under one tree that was inside of an orchard where a man was picking apples. The man hallowed to them to get out of there and after a little hesitation for the spot was a promising one they straggled off into the woods again. While they traveled they did a good deal of odd eating. They made way with an occasional chestnut and they found birch and mountain mint and dug some sassafras root which they ate after getting most of the dirt off. The biggest boy's name was Tom Cook and he would eat almost anything. He would eat acorns with the rest found too bitter and he would chew pine and hemlock needles and sweet firm leaves and all such things. He got out his knife while they were crossing a pasture and cut out a plug or bark from a pine tree and scraped out the pitch and juice next the wood and said it was sweet. The others tried it and it was sweet though they did not care much for it. In the late afternoon the squad of boys came out on a precipice of rocks that overhung a pond. The wind had gone down and the sun was getting low and it seemed best that they should start homeward. They were back among the scattered houses of the village just as the evening had begun to get dusky and frosty. The smallest boy had more than a pint of chestnuts and the biggest boy had as many as three quarts not counting stones and other rubbish. The day had been a great success but they felt as if they had trudged a thousand miles and were almost too tired to eat supper. However, when the boy began to tell his adventure and set forth in glowing terms his triumphs and trials and listed the wonderful things he had seen his spirits revived and in the evening he was able to super intend the boiling of a cup of the chestnuts he had gathered and to do his share of the eating. When the chestnut burrs opened, autumn was at its height. Now it began to decline. Every breeze set loose relays of the gaudy leaves and sent them fluttering to the earth in a many-tinted shower and the wet wigs and the increasing sharpness of the morning frost warned the farm dwellers that winter was fast approaching. End of part four, autumn, read for you by Chiquito Crasto, Birmingham, Alabama. Part five of The Farmer's Boy by Clifton Johnson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read for you by Chiquito Crasto. Part five, country children in general. In this final chapter, I propose to gather up some of the loose threads of my narrative that for one reason or another missed attention in the earlier chapters and to study the effect on his character of the life The Farmer's Boy leads. Besides, I wish to tell you something of The Farmer's Girls. They are an important part of the family life which this book attempts to portray and I have given them to scant attention. They are not so important as the boys to be sure, if we accept the latter's opinion. Though you might think after he gets to be sixteen or seventeen, he thought them more so from the amount of attention he gives them. The small girls likes and dislikes, her enthusiasm and pleasures are to a large degree identical with the boys. She will beat him half the time in the races that they run. If she has rubber boots, she is just as good a waiter. She can play ball, climb fences, slide downhill, skate, indeed do almost anything the boy can with just the same interest and enjoyment. The girl is often a leader in roaming and adventure and some girls make excellent outdoor workers too. A lively and capable girl often wishes, I fancy, that she was a boy and might have the boys' outdoor freedom and sometimes too she envies his opportunity to cope with vigorous work and win a name and place in the world. At any rate, she wishes she could slip away from the confining housework and more sober demeanor which she is expected to have. On farms where boys are lacking, the girls sometimes of necessity do the boys' work. They drive the cows to pasture, help in hoeing and weeding, load the hay and pick up potatoes. But usually, they only hover around the edges of the outdoor work. They take care of a corner in the garden and a strip of flower bed, feed the chickens, run on errands and help pick apples. The smallest girls, unless their forks are uncommonly particular, run around about as they please and dip into as many different kinds of work as they choose and they get just as smutty and dirty as any of the boys. When the girls get into long dresses, they become more and more particular as to what they are seen doing about the fields and they avoid anything but the lightest muscular exertion and not all of them even dare to make a spectacle of themselves by riding around on the horse rake and tether. The girl is early, taught to wash and wipe the dishes, to sweep, to mend wrents and so on buttons. The boy has to acknowledge that in these things his sister beats him. She can do everyone quicker and better than he can, though he claims that the buttons she sews on will come off and that, given time enough, he can sew a button on so that he can depend on that button staying where it was put to his last days. It is certain too that the girl is apt to be quicker with her mind than the boy. She has her lessons better in school and she is more docile in her behavior. Often she is the boy's helper and advisor in all sorts of difficulties and troubles and is a companion who is safer and better for him in almost every way than any of his mates. We all crave a sympathetic understanding and interest in our doings. It is the mothers and sisters who are more apt to have these qualities and it is to them that the boys go more freely with their woes and pleasures. They are far safe confidants than the rest of the world and the boy is likely to have reason for sorrow in later life because he did not follow their wishes and advised more closely. All kinds of boys are to be found on our New England farms, good and bad, handsome and homely, bright and dull, strong and weak, courageous and timid, generous and mean. I think the better qualities predominate. The typical boy is a sturdy, wholesome-looking little fellow with chubby cheeks that are well-tanned and freckled in summer and that in the winter takes a rosy glow from the keenness of the air. The same is more mildly true of the appearance of the little girls and with some advantages in their favor. You take a group of country girls some June morning on their way to school with their fresh faces and clean, starched aprons. They look, as Artemis Ward says, nice enough to eat without sass or seasoning. As the children grow up, they are apt to lose much of their simplicity and attraction. They become self-conscious and in many ways artificial, particularly in their manner and in their pleasures. This is not especially apparent in their work and there are those who continue to a large degree refreshingly earnest and natural in whatever they do and country life all through with its general habits of labor and economy and its competitive seclusion is less artificial than that of the cities. Yet there are the same tendencies in both places. The girl becomes increasingly anxious about the mode of address she wants to have all the latest puckers of the world of fashion. She twists and cuts off and curls and frizzes her hair and she braids it and rolls it and makes it stand on end in her effort to find the adjustment most becoming to her style of beauty. The result sometimes is that she has the appearance of having gone crazy. She wears toothpicked, toed, high-heeled shoes and declares publicly that they couldn't be more comfortable while privately she complains of corns. For society use she cultivates a culture tone of voice and some tosses of the head rolling up of the eyeballs, shrugging of the shoulders, etc. calculated to be killing. She has an idea that it is becoming in her to appear to take fright easily and she screeches at sudden noises and is in a panic at the appearance of the most scared and tiny of mice. A good deal of this is done for its effect on the boys. It seems to interest and entertain them and keep them hanging around. The girls sentimentalize a good deal about the boys when they get into their teens. They keep track of who is going with who and pick his looks and characteristics in their shallow way all to ravellings. What a fellow says how he curls his mustache, how he parts his hair, how horridly or how well he dances, how late it was when he got home from the last party, etc. are discussed at all kinds of times and places. Two girls who have come home from meeting together some cold autumn night will loiter and freeze to death at the gate where they are to part, talking for an hour or more over the fellows after this manner. The result is that their minds come into a state where subjects without a gossipy or sentimental turn have no interest. As a rule, the boys fall into the girls' ways and noting how the current runs encourage them. There is among the young people a good deal of flotation which I take to be a kind of aimless play, both of talk and manner that hangs around the borders of the sentimental and often gets a good way beyond it. The boy who avoids this sort of thing is said to be bashful. He is afraid of the girls, has no sentiment and all that. This may be a sufficient explanation in some cases, but in others the trouble is not in the girls, but in this kind of girls. It may be because the boy has more sentiment than the average that this sort of society is distasteful to him. Most boys are not as sentimental as our most girls. They are more worker-day and practical. Their life, in the matter of getting a living, has more responsibility than the girls. At the same time, the boy gains a coarseness of thought and feeling, often in his companionship with the men and boys he is thrown in with that the girl is almost altogether free from. It is a curious idea of manliness a boy sometimes has. He tries to express a grown-up competence to take care of himself by a rough manner and rude speech and ability to enter into the spirit of the worst kind of conversation and stories, not only without a blush but with sympathetic guffaws of laughter. He resents his parents' authority. He likes to resort to the loafing places where he has leisure. He aspires to smoke and chew and spit like the rest of the loafers there. This may be an extreme picture, but there are a vast number of boys it will fit to a degree. Most country boys admire the gentility of smoking and will be at great pains to acquire the habit after they get to be 15 or 16 years old. Perhaps the average boy never becomes a frequent smoker, but he likes the pleasurable feeling of independence it gives him when he starts off for a ride to have a cigar tilted neatly upwards from the corner of his mouth. It stamps him a gentleman to all beholders and the lookers on know from his manner and cigar that he is a person of vigorous and stoutly held opinions that it would be best not to attempt any fooling with. When you see a young man gaily riding by, sitting up very straight with his best clothes on and his five cent cigar, sending the air with its gentle aroma, you may know he is going to take his girl to ride. If he can by any manner of means find the money at this time of his career, the young man buys a fast horse and a shiny buggy carriage. He fairly dazzles your eyes as he flits swiftly past. Sometimes it takes more than one horse to finish his coating, for the first one may die of old age before he gets through. But whatever disappointment the young man suffers in his love affairs, and however his fancy or what not makes him change one girl for another, you cannot see when he starts on his journeys that he has ever lost ought of that first freshness of demeanour that characterised him, and the perfume of his cigar has the same old five cent fragrance. After all, these young fellows who go skirmishing around in this fashion are mostly hearty and good-natured. When such a one marries, his horse goes slower, the polish wears off from his carriage, he neglects his cigar, and the two settle down as a rule into a very stale and comfortable sort of folks. They might have been wiser, they might have got more from life, so could we all of us. Shakespeare said that all the world loves a lover, and people are fond of repeating the saying, but that was three hundred years ago. I don't know how it was then, nor how it is in other parts of the world now. I am very sure, however, that New England people do not love a lover. He is a butt for more poor jokes than any other character. We think he is ridiculous. We call him off and set him on and scare him and encourage him. We at least make that other saying come true, that faint heart, near one, fair lady. As for the girl, I imagine that among her friends, she gets a gentler and more cuddling treatment. Even the smallest children and some families have to endure a lot of talk from their elders about their girls and fellows. That is the most sickly sort of sentimentality. If let alone, the children's minds do not run much on these lines, though they occasionally, in their innocent way, build some very pretty castles in the air, that soon melt away harmlessly into nothing in the warmth of their other interests. Boys, when they begin to go to the largest schools of a town, are apt to learn a variety of rough tricks, exclamations, and slang that shock the folks at home, when the boys get to showing off within their sight and hearing. With the best of them, the largest part of this presently wears off. Others cultivate their accomplishments, and even make their conversation emphatic, with certain of the swear words. Such boys, the righteous of the community condemn us altogether bad, though it sometimes happens that even they have redeeming traits. I do not think that lying is a common fault of country boys, though most of them find themselves at times in circumstances that make it difficult to abstain from giving the truth a pretty severe straining, and perhaps most have two or three lies on their consciences that are undoubtedly black. But the boy has probably repented these in shame and sorrow, and hopes he never will be tempted again to tell one of the untruths he so despises. Really bad and unblushing, lying a boy is apt to learn, if ever, after he gets among the older and rougher boys, who hang around the post offices every evening at mail time, or who attend the center schools of the town. The farm, more than most places, tends to give children habits of thrift and singleness of purpose in the pursuit of education. There is seclusion enough on the majority of farms, so that the children are not confused by a multiplicity of amusements, and too much going on. This seclusion makes some dull, but to others it gives a concentrated energy, that makes them all through life, untiring workers and stout thinkers. Often from such a start, they become the world's leaders in many widely scattered fields of usefulness. Because you are a farm boy, it is not, however, certain, that you have only to seek the city to win fame and fortune. The city is already crowded with workers and with ability. It is a lonely, homesick place, and many years must pass before a person can win even a position of safety and comfort. The boys with good habits and health, and a strong will, have the best chance. The boy with loose habits and a lack of energy will find more temptations to a weak and purposeless career than in the country. Some boys and girls can live lives of wider usefulness in the large towns than in the country, and it is best for them to go there. But it is a serious question for most, whether they will gain anything by the change. It was my plan in this book to take the farmer's boy straight through the year. There still remains a final month that has not been treated. With Thanksgiving, autumn ends and winter begins. The trees have been bare for some time. The grasses withered brown, and the landscape white with frost every morning. They have been high winds whistling about the farm buildings and scurrying through the leaf litter of the fields. Snow squalls have whitened the air, and the roadway pools have frequently been glazed with ice. But the solid freezing and snows of winter are not looked for until after Thanksgiving. The boy gets out his old mittens and his cloth cap that he can pull down over his ears, and he keeps his coat collar turned up, and hugs himself and draws himself into a narrower compass as he does his outdoor work. On some cold morning, he gets out his sled, and if he finds a bank steep enough, he slides down on the frost very well. He tries such ice as comes in his way, and of course breaks through and gets his feet muddy. Then real winter comes. The world is all white, and the sleigh bells jingle along the road, and the ponds and rivers are bridged with solid ice. The boy, with some other boys and perhaps some of the girls too, is often out with his sled. They do a good deal of sliding down the steepest kind of hills, indeed, that is a sort that they search out. And if it has a few lively bumps in it, so much the better. They dash down the decline in the most reckless fashion, and then keep going up a little higher to make the descent still faster and more exciting. One little fellow who lies flat on his sled and steers with his toes, gets slewed out of the track, and goes rolling over and over with his sled in a cloud of flying snow. You will think it would be the end of him, but he gets tipped, dazed, and powdered wide from head to foot, and his lip quivers, and some tears trickle from his eyes. He says in a shaky voice that he's going home. The other boys gather round and brush him off, and Willy Hooper lends him his handkerchief, when the boy can't find his own. And they tell him how he looked going over and over, and what he ought to have done, and that he's all right. And to come on now. There ain't no use of going in just for that. We'll have a lot of fun yet. The boy finds himself comforted, and in a few minutes he's as lively, careering down the hill with the others as ever. By the time a boy gets to be six or seven years old, he expects to find a pair of skates in his Christmas stocking. For some time after that, his head accumulates bumps of a kind that would be apt to puzzle a phrenologist. It is astonishing in what a sudden and unexpected man are the skates will slip from under you. There's not even a chance to throw out your hands to save yourself. You are in luck if you can manage to sit down instead of going full length. Your ankles wobble unaccountably, and the moment you leave off mincing along in a sort of awkward, short step walk and try to strike out, down you go on your head. Then your skate straps are always loosening, or getting under your skates and tripping you up, and your feet become cold, and your middens get wet. But the boy keeps at it with a perseverance and difficulty and disaster that would accomplish wonders if applied to work. In time, he can skim around with any of them and play shinny and skate backward and in a circle, and cut a figure eight in the ice, and almost do a number of other remarkable things. The boy who skates much has to experience a few breakings through the ice. On the little ponds and near the show, this is often fun, and the boy who dares go nearest to the weak places and slides longest on a bender is a hero in his mate's estimation, and I might add, in his own. When he does break in, he very likely only gets his feet wet, and he does not mind that very much. When when he breaks through in some deep place and does not grip the ice until he is in up to his arms, it is no smiling matter. He usually scrambles out quickly enough, but the worst if it comes in getting home in his freezing clothing that conducts the chill of the frosty air clear to his bones. Yet it rarely happens that anything serious comes of these accidents. The year goes out with Christmas, the holiday that perhaps shines brightest of all the list in the boy's mind. A few days before its advent, he and his folks visit the town where all the stores are to make the necessary purchases. They do much mysterious advising together, but never as a family group. There always is at least one shut out. It takes a great deal of consideration and calculation to make 49 cents go around among all your friends, but the members of the family are usually considerate, and when the boy fishes for hints of their likes, they make it clear in suggesting the thing they most want, that he will not have to spend such a great deal. Then, while he is buying in the store, the others that happen to be with him are always good enough to stand by the door and look the other way, so that, of course, when they get their presents, they are a great surprise to them. Each of the children brings home various little packages which they are at great pains to hide away from the others, though they cannot forbear to talk about them darkly and make the others guess until they are almost telling themselves. Some of them, particularly the girls, are apt to be making things about this time, and you have to be careful how you notice what is left lying around or you discover secrets, and there is likely to be a sudden hustling of things out of sight when you come into the room and looks of such exaggerated innocence that you know something is going on. If you show an inclination to stop, your sister says, Come now, Tommy, to go along. What for? says Tommy. Oh, you've been in the house long enough, is a reply. Well, I guess I want to get warm. Tommy continues. It's pretty cold outdoors. Say, what is it you're sitting on, Nell, anyway? I didn't say I was sitting on anything, says Nelly. You just go along out or you shan't have it. Tom blows his nose and laughs and pulls on his mittens and shuffles off. On Christmas Eve, the children hang up their stockings back of the stove and are hopeful of presence in spite of the disbelief they express in the possibility of Santa Claus coming down the stovepipe. Sure enough, in the morning, the stockings are all bunchy with the things in them and the children have a great celebration, pulling them out and getting the wraps off the packages. They do all this without stopping to get more than half dressed and breakfast has to wait for them. They are in no haste, for they have popcorn and candy to munch on that they found in their stockings and everyone has to show all his things to each of the rest and see all the others have and spring the babies jack in the box about half a dozen times till they get used to the fright of it. They have better things to eat that day than usual and more of them and with that and the sweet meats and extras some of the children are likely to get sick and quarrelsome before the day is out. In the evening, there is perhaps a Christmas tree at the schoolhouse. There has been a turmoil of preparation in the neighborhood for several days previous for the children have to be set learning pieces and practicing and fixing up costumes and cakes and cookies and all the good things to eat have to be made ready and someone has to collect the dimes and nickels and quarters to get candy and oranges and Christmas tree trimmings with. Then some two or three have to make a journey to the woods and chop a good branchy hemlock or spruce of the right size and get it set up in the corner of the schoolhouse. Finally, the green curtains have to be hung that will separate the audience from the stage where the small people do their acting and speak their pieces. The whole village turned out in the evening. They came on foot and they came in teams. Usually each group carried a lantern to light its way and these were set in the entry when their bearers went in. The schoolhouse windows were a glow with light and within things fairly glittered to the children's eyes. There were six lamps along the walls besides those back of the curtains and everyone was lighted and turned up almost to the smoking point. Everybody was there besides four boys from the next village who sat on a front seat and James Peterson's dog. Some of the big people got into some of the small seats and certain of the neighbors who didn't get along very well with certain others had to manage carefully not to run across each other's courses. The air was full of the hum of talk and the young people were running all about the open spaces and in and out the door and there were consultations and giggling and flurries over things forgotten or lost or something else without number. The curtain was drawn but you could see the top of the gaily loaded tree over it and the movement of feet under it and you could see queer shadows of figures within doing mysterious things on it. Sometimes a figure brushed against the curtain and it came bulging way out into the room and the four boys from the next town had the greatest work to keep from exploding over the funniness of this and as it was one of them tumbled off from the narrow seat he occupied. By and by there was a quieting in the flurry up in front and someone stood before the curtain with a paper in his hand and announced that the first exercise of the evening would be so and so. There was no astonishing genius shown in what followed but a person would have to be very dispeptic not to enjoy the simplicity and earnestness of it all. Each child had his or her individual way and some were so small they could only pipe and list the words and you didn't know what they said but when they made their little bows and hurried off to find their mothers you and the rest of the audience were delighted and applauded just the same. There was a melodian at one side of the room and the school sang some songs and one of the young ladies sang a solo all alone and they had a dialogue with Santa Claus in it who was so dressed up in a long beard and a fur coat and a deep voice that you wouldn't have any idea it was only Hiram Taylor. At length came the Christmas tree how handsome it looked with all the packages and bright things hung among its green twigs and the strings of popcorn looped all about and the oranges and candy bags dangling everywhere. Three or four of the young people took off the presents and called out names and kept everybody growing happier and happier. When the tree was bare and even the popcorn and candy bags and oranges had been distributed some of the women folk got lively in a corner where there was a table piled all over with baskets and boxes. Then plates began to circulate around and it was found that there was a pot boiling on the stove and a smell of coffee and chocolate in the air. About 19 different kinds of cakes started on their wanderings and there were biscuit and something to drink and nuts that were partly walnuts and partly stone nuts and you had a chance to talk with everybody and show your presence and altogether had so good a time that you felt as if it would last the whole year through. It would take many books to tell all there is to tell about the farmer's boy and what better place is there to leave him than this Christmas night with the rest of the family snucked up among the robes of the sleigh on the way home. The lantern on the dashboard flashes its light along the road ahead the horse's hoofs strike crisply on the frozen snow the bells jingle and the sky over hears glitters full of radiant stars in the gliding sleigh are the children holding their precious presents in their laps and still in animated conversation they reveal the events of the evening the sleigh moves on they are lost to sight the book is ended End of Part 5 Country Children in General End of The Farmer's Boy by Clifton Johnson Read for you by Chiquito Crasto Birmingham, Alabama