or sending the dog into the river after sticks. He had to
submit, in the first place, to the restraint of shoes and stockings. He
read in the Old Testament that when Moses came to holy ground, he put
off his shoes; but the boy was obliged to put his on, upon the holy
day, not only to go to meeting, but while he sat at home. Only the
emancipated country-boy, who is as agile on his bare feet as a young
kid, and rejoices in the pressure of the warm soft earth, knows what a
hardship it is to tie on stiff shoes. The monks who put peas in their
shoes as a penance do not suffer more than the country-boy in his
penitential Sunday shoes. I recall the celerity with which he used to
kick them off at sundown.

Sunday morning was not an idle one for the farmer-boy. He must rise
tolerably early, for the cows were to be milked and driven to pasture;
family prayers were a little longer than on other days; there were the
Sunday-school verses to be relearned, for they did not stay in mind over
night; perhaps the wagon was to be greased before the neighbors began to
drive by; and the horse was to be caught out of the pasture, ridden home
bareback, and harnessed.

This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun usually,
and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been wanted
for taking the family to meeting. It was so peaceful and still in the
pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so playful, the
colts never so frisky. Round and round the lot the boy went calling, in
an entreating Sunday voice, "Jock, jock, jock, jock," and shaking his
salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect, and shaking tails and
flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and gave the boy a pretty
good race before he could coax the nose of one of them into his dish.
The boy got angry, and came very near saying "dum it," but he rather
enjoyed the fun, after all.

The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety was divided between the set
of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory of the
Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was through the
house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept running hither and
thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or
to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch of caraway-seed.
Already the deacon's mare, with a wagon-load of the deacon's folks, had
gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up