The placid stream flowed on.
So now, when the day’s work is done, I turn homeward here to Mullein Hill, and these early autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the stable, while four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow—“Bucksy” stories of the noble red-man; stories of Arthur and the Table Round, of Guyon and Britomart, and the heroes of old; and marvelous stories of that greatest hero of them all—their father, far away yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many interesting things to do, and such fun doing them!
Now the world is so “full of a number of things”—things to do still, but things, instead of hands, and things instead of selves, so many things to do them with—even a thing to milk with, now! But I will continue to use my hands.
No, I shall probably never become a great milk-contractor. I shall probably remain only a Commuter to the end. But if I never become anything great,—the Father of my Country, or the Father of Poetry, or the Father of Chemistry, or the Father of the Flying Machine,—why, I am at least the father of these four shining faces in the lantern light; and I have, besides them, handed down from the past, a few more of life’s old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle reader, with their simple old-fashioned blessings.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A