LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| PAGE | |
| Fishing on the Swimming Rock (see page [169]) | [Frontispiece.] |
| Being a Boy | [2] |
| The Farm Oxen | [4] |
| At the Pasture Bars | [8] |
| In the Cattle Pasture | [10] |
| After a Crow's Nest | [16] |
| A String of Speckled Trout | [20] |
| Watching for Sunset | [28] |
| Riding Bareback | [32] |
| Turning the Grindstone | [36] |
| Snaring Suckers | [45] |
| Picking up Potatoes | [48] |
| Leap-frog at Recess | [50] |
| Pounding off Shucks | [58] |
| Running on the Stone Wall | [75] |
| Coasting | [83] |
| In School | [89] |
| A Remote Farm-House | [93] |
| Going Home with Cynthia | [111] |
| A Young Sugar Maker | [119] |
| Watching the Kettles | [121] |
| The Village from the Hill | [127] |
| Treeing a Woodchuck | [131] |
| Looking for Frogs | [136] |
| Trout Fishing | [140] |
| Forced to go to Bed | [148] |
| Slippery Work | [165] |
| Rigging up the Fishing-Tackle | [169] |
| Watching the Fishes | [170] |
| Entering the Old Bridge | [178] |
| The Old Watering Trough | [180] |
| The New England Boy | [184] |
PREFACE TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION
This volume was first published over twenty years ago. If any of the boys described in it were real, they have long since grown up, got married, gone West, become selectmen or sheriffs, gone to Congress, invented an electric churn, become editors or preachers or commercial travelers, written a book, served a term as consul to a country the language of which they did not know, or plodded along on a farm, cultivating rheumatism and acquiring invaluable knowledge of the most fickle weather known in a region which has all the fascination and all the power of being disagreeable belonging to the most accomplished coquette in the world.
The rural life described is that of New England between 1830 and 1850, in a period of darkness, before the use of lucifer matches; but when, although religion had a touch of gloom and all pleasure was heightened by a timorous apprehension that it was sin, the sun shone, the woods were full of pungent scents, nature was strong in its invitations to cheerfulness, and girls were as sweet and winsome as they are in the old ballads.