Being a Boy | Page 9

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 is sent to the spring for a pitcher of water, and the
family are waiting at the dinner-table, he is absent so long; for he stops
to poke the frog that sits on the stone, or, if there is a penstock, to put
his hand over the spout and squirt the water a little while. He is the one
who spreads the grass when the men have cut it; he mows it away in
the barn; he rides the horse to cultivate the corn, up and down the hot,
weary rows; he picks up the potatoes when they are dug; he drives the
cows night and morning; he brings wood and water and splits kindling;
he gets up the horse and puts out the horse; whether he is in the house
or out of it, there is always something for him to do. Just before school
in winter he shovels paths; in summer he turns the grindstone. He
knows where there are lots of winter-greens and sweet flag-root, but
instead of going for them, he is to stay in-doors and pare apples and
stone raisins and pound something in a mortar. And yet, with his mind
full of schemes of what he would like to do, and his hands full of
occupations, he is an idle boy who has nothing to busy himself with but
school and chores! He would gladly do all the work if somebody else
would do the chores, he thinks, and yet I doubt if any boy ever
amounted to anything in the world, or was of much use as a man, who
did not enjoy the advantages of a liberal education in the way of