We used to go down to the garden every morning to pick the vegetables for dinner, and we always helped Grandma shell the peas and string the beans. It took a good big panful, too, for we were pretty hungry up there on the farm.
Every morning we drove the cows to the pasture, and every afternoon we drove them home. We hunted for hens' eggs in the big barn, and went blueberrying and blackberrying. Kenneth made a collection of wild flowers, and Grandma showed him how to press them so that he could take them home.
What good times we did have! Even on rainy days there was always something to do, and we often had the most fun of all when it was raining the hardest. All the boys in the neighborhood got into the habit of coming to play with us in one of Grandpa's barns; and we used to have circuses and tight-rope walking and all sorts of games.
But one day, when we had been having a very jolly time together, one of the boys suggested that we should try a new game. "I'm tired of walking on beams and jumping off hay-mows," he said. "Let's do something different."
He took a whole bunch of matches out of his pocket and held them up. "Let's try scratching matches, and see who can scratch the most and blow them out again in one minute," he suggested.
I, for one, knew very well that matches were not made to play with, and I said so. Kenneth and Willie Smith agreed with me. So did Joe Wiggin and Peter Fisher, but four or five of the boys thought it would be great fun, and in spite of all we could say the match-race began.
Four boys sat down in a circle on the barn floor, lighting and blowing out the matches just as fast as they could, while Harry Plummer counted sixty.
In their hurry, they threw the matches down carelessly, and before any of us noticed it, a lighted match had been thrown into the hay.
It blazed up in an instant, and before we could run to the field for help the whole barn was a roaring furnace. Joe Wiggin and Peter Fisher led out the two horses, and fortunately, the cows were in the pasture, for in less than half an hour the barn was burned to the ground. All the hay that we had worked so hard to get in was lost, besides some of Grandpa's tools and his new hay-rack.
Grandpa and the hired man got there in time to save the harnesses and a few little things, and then all we could do was just to stand there and watch the barn burn. The nearest fire-engine was in the village four miles away, and all the water we had was in one well.