CHAPTER II
WORKING ON THE FARM
The winter school had closed, and my spring work on the farm had begun. Boys of my age in New England, at least farmer boys, did not, as a rule, attend school in summer: it was thought that winter schooling was enough. My mother, however, intended for me to graduate in the high school later. Like most New England people, mother believed in the potency of work as a needful part of a boy’s or girl’s education. Work, she declared never hurt any one; while laziness and the feeling that one is too good to work were the foundation of shiftlessness and poverty. People must fight for anything worth having, and farming is a fight with the soil to make it yield a living.
“Your father,” she would say, “was a farmer and a good one; he believed as religiously in fighting the soil and keeping down the weeds, as he believed in fighting the Confederates and putting down the Rebellion. If you expect this farm to be yours, and to pay off the mortgage on it,” she would add, “you have got to learn about the work, or the rocks and weeds will get the best of you, and it will be of no use when you get it. You will be selling it, and spending the money, and become a shack of a man like some others who think they are too good to work.”
“But you have succeeded in working the farm,” I argued, “without knowing the work practically.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but I was brought up on this farm and have learned what it will best raise. I know the business part; but if I understood the farm better I wouldn’t have to stand Bill Jenkins’ dictation, when he wants to have his way instead of mine.”
“What makes you keep him,” I asked; “he growls about what you ought to do, instead of taking your orders and obeying them.”
“He is faithful,” she replied, “and is to be trusted. If you can’t trust a man, he is of no use to you anywhere.”
Although Jot had now been with us long enough to receive several months’ pay, he still wore the same suit of clothes as when he came to the Stark farm. I afterward learned it was because he had been paying for his mother’s sickness and funeral. He was still reticent about his father, and would give no account of himself, except a general one. He talked, however, quite freely about his mother, and about his uncle Jed, and was intensely patriotic.
“I would like to fight for this country, as my uncle did,” he would sometimes say, “if I should ever be needed.”
We continued to read the news of the war as it came across the sea. Our hearts were thrilled at even the meagre recital given in our weekly paper, of that great adventure of arms, when like a lion the great French general with his brave army, stood in the path of German invasion and said, “They shall not pass!”