[ON THE FARM IN WINTER.]
THE life of a boy in winter on the old-fashioned New England farm seems to me one of the best of the right kinds of life for a healthy lad, provided his tastes have not been spoiled by wrong reading, or by some misleading glimpse of a city by gas-light. It certainly abounds with the blood and muscle-making sports for which the city physiologists so anxiously strive to substitute rinks and gymnasiums.
But I rather pity a young fellow who gets his only sleigh rides by paying a dollar an hour to the livery-stable, and who must do his skating within limits on artificial ice. He never gets even a taste of such primitive fun as two boys I know had last winter. The sleigh was at the wagon-maker’s shop for repairs when the first heavy snow fell, and they harnessed Dobbin to an old boat, and had an uproarious ride up hill and down dale, with glorious bumps and jolts.
I rather pity a fellow, too, who eats grocer’s apples, and confectioner’s nuts, and baker’s cream cakes, who never knows the fun of going down cellar to the apple bins to fill his pockets for school, and who owns no right in a pile of butternuts on the garret floor. I am sorry for a boy that knows nothing of the manly freedom of trowsers tucked in boots, hands and feet both cased in home-knit mittens and home-knit socks—I cannot believe his blood is as red, or can possibly flow so deep and strong in his sidewalk sort of life, as the young fellows who chop wood and ply the snow-shovel, and turn out en masse with snow-ploughs after a long storm—the sound of the future strength of the land is in the sturdy stamp of their snowy boots at the door as they come in from their hearty work. I am not writing of country boys that want to be clerks,—they are spoiled for fun anyhow,—but of the boys that expect, if they expect anything in particular, to stay on the farm and own it themselves some day.
This stinging cold morning the boys at the school-house door are not discussing the play-bills of the Globe or the Museum, but how the river froze last night, turning the long quiet surface to blue-black ice, as smooth as a looking-glass. Now what skating! what grand noonings, what glorious evenings! No rink or frog-pond, where one no sooner gets under headway than he must turn about, but miles and miles of curving reaches leading him forward between rustling sedges, till he sees the white caps of the open lake dancing before him.
Presently the snow comes and puts an end to the sport; for sweeping miles and miles of ice is out of the question. After the snow, a thaw; and then the jolly snow-balling. There is not enough of a thaw to take the snow off; only enough to make it just sufficiently sloppy and soft for the freeze-up that follows to give it a crust almost as hard and smooth as the ice lately covered up.
THE IMPROVISED SLEIGH.