Pocket Island | Page 7

are a
closed book to the city boy. The country boy is surrounded by pure and

wholesome influences and grows to be a better man for it. The wide
range of forest and field, pure air, sweet water, plenty of sun and rain
are all his, and worth ten times the chance for life, health, enjoyment
and a good character than ever comes to the city boy. He may sooner
learn to smoke or gather a choice selection of profane and vulgar words;
he may have smaller feet and better clothes, but he often fails in
attaining a healthy body and pure mind and never knows what a royal,
wide-open chance for enjoying boyhood days he has missed. He never
knows the delight of wading barefoot down a mountain brook where
the clear water leaps over mossy ledges and where he can pull trout
from every foam-flecked pool! He never realizes the charming
suspense of lying upon the grassy bank of a meadow stream and
snaring a sucker, or what fun it is to enter a chestnut grove just after
frost and rain have covered the ground with brown nuts, or setting traps,
shaking apple trees, or gathering wild grapes! He never rode to the
cider-mill on a load of apples and had the chance to shy one at every
bird and squirrel on the way; or when winter came, to slide down hill
when the slide was a half-mile field of crusted snow! All these and
many other delights he never knows; but one thing he does know, and
knows it early, and that is how much smarter, better dressed and better
off in every way he is than the poor, despised greeny of a country boy!
He may, it is true, go early to the theatre and look at half-nude actresses
loaded with diamonds, but he never sees a twenty-acre cedar pasture
just after an ice storm when the morning sun shines fair upon it!
True to his inverted comprehension, the country boy, and our boy
especially, sees and feels all his surroundings and all the voices of
nature from a boy's standpoint. He feels that his hours of work are long
and hard, and that the countless chores are interspersed through his
daily life on the farm for the sole purpose of preventing him from
having a moment he can call his own. He has a great many pleasant
hours, however, and does not realize why they pass so quickly. His
little world seems large to him and all his experiences great in their
importance. A ten-acre meadow appears like a boundless prairie, and a
half-mile wide piece of woods an unbounded forest.
On one side of the farm is a clear stream known as Ragged Brook, that,

starting among the foothills of a low mountain range, laughs and
chatters, leaps and tumbles, down the hills, through the gorges and over
the ledges as if endowed with life. Since he is not blessed with brothers
or sisters, this, together with the woods, the birds and squirrels,
becomes his companion. The first trout he ever catches in this brook
seems a monster and never afterward does one pull quite so hard.
Isolated as he is, and having none but his elders for company, he talks
to the creatures of the field and forest as if they could understand him,
and he watches their ways and habits and tries to make them his friends.
He is a lonely boy, and seldom sees others of his age, so that perhaps
when he does they make a more distinct impression on his mind.
One day he is allowed to go to the mill with his father, and it is an
event in his life he never forgets. The old brown mill with its big wheel
splashing in the clear water; the millstones that rumble so swiftly; the
dusty miller who takes the bags of grain--all interest him, and
especially so does the pond above the mill that is dotted with white
lilies and where there is a boat fastened to a willow by a chain. On the
way back, and a mile from home, his father stops to chat with a man in
front of a large house with tall pillars, and two immense maples on
either side of the gate. Standing beside the man and holding onto one of
his hands with her two small ones is a little girl who looks at the boy
with big, wondrous eyes. He wants to tell her about the mill and ask her
if she ever saw the great wheel go around, but he is afraid to. He hears
the man call her "Liddy," and wonders if she ever caught a fish.
Then his world grows larger as the months pass one by one, until