alves; they always need feeding, or shutting up,
or letting out; when the boy wants to play, there are those calves to
be looked after,--until he gets to hate the name of calf. But in
consideration of his faithfulness, two of them are given to him. There
is no doubt that they are his: he has the entire charge of them. When
they get to be steers he spends all his holidays in breaking them in to
a yoke. He gets them so broken in that they will run like a pair of deer
all over the farm, turning the yoke, and kicking their heels, while he
follows in full chase, shouting the ox language till he is red in the
face. When the steers grow up to be cattle, a drover one day comes along
and takes them away, and the boy is told that he can have another pair
of calves; and so, with undiminished faith, he goes back and begins over
again to make his fortune. He owns lambs and young colts in the same
way, and makes just as much out of them.

There are ways in which the farmer-boy can earn money, as by gathering
the early chestnuts and taking them to the corner store, or by finding
turkeys' eggs and selling them to his mother; and another way is to go
without butter at the table--but the money thus made is for the heathen.
John read in Dr. Livingstone that some of the tribes in Central Africa
(which is represented by a blank spot in the atlas) use the butter to
grease their hair, putting on pounds of it at a time; and he said he
had rather eat his butter than have it put to that use, especially as it
melted away so fast in that hot climate.

Of course it was explained to John that the missionaries do not actually
carry butter to Africa, and that they must usually go without it
themselves there, it being almost impossible to make it good from the
milk in the cocoanuts. And it was further explained to him that even
if the heathen never received his butter or the money for it, it was an
excellent thing for a boy to cultivate the habit of self-denial and of
benevolence, and if the heathen never heard of him, he would be blessed
for his generosity. This was all true.

But John said that he was tired of supporting the heathen out of his
butter, and he wished the rest of the family would also stop eating
butter and save the money for missions; and he wanted to know where the
other members of the family got their money to send to the heathen; and
his mother said that he was about half right, and that self-denial was
just as good for grown peop