Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs broke out of the pen, about nine o’clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs. Hiram needed our help to get them in—there was no use in pretending that we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game, but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the only way to keep one’s temper at all is to regard it, for the time being, as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own rewards. But the attitude is difficult to maintain, especially late at night.
On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the house, I could [pg 076] not refrain from saying, with some edge, “I never wanted to keep pigs anyway.”
“Who says we’re keeping them?” remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and laughed.
“You needn’t think I’m laughing because you said anything specially funny,” I said. “It’s only because I’m tired enough to laugh at anything.”
The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I finally broke out, “Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!”
“I’ll have the thing together now in a jiffy,” said Jonathan.
“Jiffy! There’s no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night,” I snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked. “Why can’t we find a really simple way of living? This isn’t simple. It’s highly complex and very difficult.”
“You cut those washers very well,” suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I was not prepared to be soothed.
“It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we’ve done this evening! We’ve shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog’s chain, and now we’ve fixed the pump—and it won’t stay fixed at that!”
“Fair evening’s work,” murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.