"You're blue as a whetstone now, but a couple of fritters big as rhinoceroses on your plate to-morrow night will set you up again, I guess," she says.
The hired man has a monstrous inaptitude for doing an errand. The time he spends going to the Green to get the horses shod is enormous. He can be depended on for nothing but to come home across lots when the dinner-horn blows.
Said the farmer to his hired man, "Go to the Holler and bring the square immediately."—"That saws my legs off," he added soon after, seeing "Square" Catesby pounding along the road toward the farm with a face of great importance and concern, the hired man in full swing behind, evidently bringing him.
Melvine, a fat, lazy farmer—so fat he had lost his voice, probably inside of him somewhere—while dozing away a winter afternoon yawned to such an immoderate degree that he dislocated his jaw. The hired man was despatched to the village for a doctor, and in the course of revolving ages returned, without the doctor. "Where is the doctor?" cried the folks. "He wasn't to hum," replied the hired man.—"Misery to tell! Didn't you bring one? Go back and get one," shouted they. The hired man mogged off, hitched up again, and after an interminable period, during which Melvine cast figurative ashes on his bald head (if they had been actual wood-ashes and "lively" he could not have suffered worse), did bring a doctor. The doctor gave Melvine's jaw a tap: it flew into place. Here pause: trouble no kind heart with the hired man's fate when Melvine regained the use of his jaw.
The hired girl's autumn and winter beam with long evenings of leisure, when neighbors drop in for talk, games and stories go round, and spitzenbergs and gillyflowers, nutcakes, cider, and butternuts that make cider taste wonderfully delicious, are enjoyed. In farm-houses among the hills games are played that were known to the hearths of the Angles. "Saddleback" is one. The farmer takes a brand from the fire, saying,
"Robin's alive—as live as a bee:
If he dies in my hand, you may saddleback me;"
and gives it to his next neighbor, who repeats the verse and hands the brand to his neighbor; and thus it goes round the circle. He in whose hand the brand goes out ('tis the hired man, of course, who never can scramble through his verse half fast enough) must be blind-folded and guess what objects are held before him, all he guesses wrong to be placed on his back at the end of his guessing. Then he lies face down on the floor, while kitchen tables and chairs, skillets, pokers, tongs, frying-pans, the bread-board, the rolling-pin, the egg-beater, all are piled on his back; after which he rises slowly and overturns the things with a house-quaking crash which is rather interesting to hear and see. Antique stories that were never written, or, if at all, were written in dead languages that tell no tales at the present time, fill the lapse of the winter evening until it is time honest folks were in bed and thieves a-jogging. Listen to this: it has the flavor of a sip of mulse from a yew-tree keg. It was told among the Druids, maybe, long ago in gray-lit ages a thousand years before the mediæval darkness, when King Cymbeline was building his city of Warwick, and his fair daughter Imogen was having adventures in a cavern. Call it How Cunning paid better than Industry.
Richard was a hard-working, saving farmer: his brother Ned was a lazy lout. Ned's cow died, and he hung the cowskin up in the barn to dry, too lazy to carry it to market. After the cowskin was dried up, Ned started for town to sell it. On the way, feeling lazy, he wrapped himself in his cowskin and went to sleep in a barn's hay-mow. Night came, and some robbers with a lantern entered the barn to count their gold. Ned with a groan rolled himself down from the mow, horns, hoofs and tail, and the robbers fled in terror, leaving their money behind. "Where did you get your gold?" asked Richard, seeing his brother's treasure.—"I sold my cowskin for a penny a hair," answered Ned. Then Richard killed his cows, dried their skins and took them to market. Enraged at not selling them, he fell upon his brother, tied him in a bag and took him to the river to drown him. Before throwing him in he thought he would give Ned a good licking; so he went to the woods to get some withes. While he was gone a man with a flock of sheep came by, who, seeing Ned struggling in the bag on the river-bank, asked, "What are you doing in the bag?"—"Going to heaven," replied Ned.—"How is that?" questioned the man.—"You get in here and you will see," said Ned. The man untied the bag, and took Ned's place therein. Ned tied him up, and drove the sheep off to market. When Richard returned from the woods he gave the shepherd in the bag a basting, threw him into the river, and after the last bubble had risen to the surface went home, where he found Ned counting a pile of gold. "Whence that treasure?" asked Richard.—"The bubbles you saw when you drowned me turned into sheep, and I took them to town and sold them," quoth Ned.
As a rule, the hired girl and the hired man are not good friends: he derides her, and she scorns him. "I do expise that Bill Blowers: he don't know beans when the bag's untied. He's as bashful as nothing," says she. She likes the farm-hand by the day: she often visits his cotland on the edge of a woods. He really is a man to respect, knows a reason for the crooks in the mully scythe and in the light cradle's snath, and can tell the time of day by holding his hoe-handle straight in the sunshine and looking at its shadow on the ground. The hired girl particularly hates the Scotch hired man, a fellow with a face like a wig-block, white hair and eyebrows, and a working-suit made apparently of old snuff-rags and flatiron-holders. He keeps his eye on the blue-ringed cider pitcher of winter evenings, and, to the huge disgust of his comrades, drinks up the vial of cider vinegar placed in the pail with the boiled potatoes and sweet, buttery pork which form their lunch when they go to the forest chopping. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that an awkward man is graceful when he is asleep or at work or agreeably amused. It is perfectly evident that Emerson has never seen the Scotch hired man. When he is asleep his knurly limbs are twisted to an indescribable pitch, his right elbow under his head, his left in the small of his back; when at work he humps himself out of all proportion; and when agreeably amused he canters about as does a new-born calf with its legs thrust out at different angles.
The hired girl does fall in love with the English hired man on occasion. "Stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!" cries the farmer's wife then. 'Tis a fine thing for the hired man. He escapes the miseries human beings have to endure going courting—the "slicking up," the hair-oiling, the blacking of wrinkly, turn-up-toed fine boots, the wearing of a fine shirt that must have been made to fit a pelican, it is so bulgy-bosomed, and the awful and stiffening sensations a man feels when he goes into a stark neat parlor to see a girl. He does his courting with rolled-up sleeves and the dust of the bean-thrashing in his hair. The English hired man is a prize for the girl. When first he comes to America he wears coarse linen, heavy shoes, corduroys and a pair of broad, inelastic, red and white suspenders, capable of sustaining several tons, that he bought in Liverpool before sailing. He eats a leg of mutton and potatoes to match at a sitting; he slips the half of a custard pie on to his plate, and takes down a whole "boiled Indian" like smoke if it stands at his hand. He ignores salt-spoons, sugar-spoons and butter-knives, and, if the truth must be told, cleans his knife in his mouth. (The man whom Professor Proctor, the astronomer, saw at Des Moines putting his knife down his throat and sticking it into the butter, and wrote home to the Gentleman's Magazine about, was an English hired man on his travels.) Nevertheless, living among decent people corrects these blemishes in the Englishman, and his merits soon shine undimmed. He has a hale countenance; he has length of limb, breadth of grasp, glorious plenitudes of health, English self-conceit, the taste for toil and distaste for pleasure; and he has a talent for economizing. He carries his money around until it is worked into a hard ball in his pocket-book, so that when he wants to lend some he has to peel it off. Vast are the revenues of parsimony. "Sense and economy must rule in a world that is made of sense and economy." The English hired man is the first of adventurers. His wages are waiting for him; his farm is prepared; bees, beeves, orchards and fields of wheat are his for the taking. The hired girl marries him, and her career ends in a blaze of happiness and prosperity.