"I want to go way back yonder in my life to a house half hidden from view by the locusts and maples, where the bees hummed and swarmed. I want a scent of the honeysuckle as the maples and locusts budded forth in what seemed to me the morning of the world—springtime. I want to follow the path down by the big spring, through the hazel bushes, where the cotton tail jumped up just ahead of you and the redbird sang his sweetest song. I can follow the path in my mind as the hunting dog follows the scent, down to the old rock hole where the clear, cool waters of the creek formed an eddy, in which the chub and yellow perch lurked and jumped at the bait as they never did anywhere else.
"I want to feel that ecstacy that only comes to a boy when the bottle cork you used for a bobber goes under water, when something is pulling on the line like a scared mule, bending double the pole cut in the thicket on your way to the creek. I want to throw the pole away, roll up the tangled line, hide it away in the corn crib, and sneak back to the house the opposite direction from the creek, that the folks wouldn't suspect I had been fishing on Sunday.
"I want to go back yonder in my life where the hills meet the sky in a purple haze, where you feel yourself growing with the trees, where the smell of new earth calls you to the woods, where the dogwood is budding and the may-apple peeps up through last year's leaves at the new leaves budding out on the grand old maples above.
"I want to go so far back from the worries of city life that the crowing of the cock and the cackle of the hen will tell me it is morning, instead of the clanging of bells and blowing of whistles. I want to go back yonder where the setting sun, instead of the city lights, will tell me it is night. I want to hear the cricket and whip-poor-will as we heard them in the evenings long ago, as we listened with bated breath to the jack o'-lantern legends that stirred our childish fancy until the croaking of the frogs sent us to bed to dream of uncanny things.
"I want to live in the happiness of an autumn when the frost was on the pumpkin and the fodder in the shock; when the hickory nuts falling on the ground called the squirrels; when the stars gleamed bright enough to afford you light to bring a 'possum out of a tree with the old flintlock musket—how you cherished that gun. And when the snow hid the roads and paths like the white coverlet on the big bed in the spare room and the big backlog crackled and burned on the hearth, and the red apples glistened in the firelight, and the popcorn imitation of a snowstorm was more realistic than any artificial one that you have since witnessed.
"How you shivered as you undressed in the room above going to bed, but how soundly you slept after you got warm. I want to go back to one of those hallowed Sunday mornings in summer when the hush of heaven seemed to fall on earth; when the quiet that spread over hill and vale seemed to announce the Spirit of God in some unusual sense; when the peace of heaven seemed so near you felt its happiness.
"While living the old days over—the days way back yonder—I want to live in the love of my friends of today. Whilst I cherish only a memory of the friends of the old days, I hold, after my family, the love and esteem of my friends of today above all things in this life.
"Gentlemen, come down to the farm. Visit with me and endeavor to live the life of a boy again, if only for a day."
Bill Brown as a Farmer