ve just after frost and rain have covered the
ground with brown nuts, or setting traps, shaking apple trees, or
gathering wild grapes! He never rode to the cider-mill on a load of
apples and had the chance to shy one at every bird and squirrel on the
way; or when winter came, to slide down hill when the slide was a
half-mile field of crusted snow! All these and many other delights he
never knows; but one thing he does know, and knows it early, and that is
how much smarter, better dressed and better off in every way he is than
the poor, despised greeny of a country boy! He may, it is true, go early
to the theatre and look at half-nude actresses loaded with diamonds, but
he never sees a twenty-acre cedar pasture just after an ice storm when
the morning sun shines fair upon it!

True to his inverted comprehension, the country boy, and our boy
especially, sees and feels all his surroundings and all the voices of
nature from a boy's standpoint. He feels that his hours of work are long
and hard, and that the countless chores are interspersed through his
daily life on the farm for the sole purpose of preventing him from
having a moment he can call his own. He has a great many pleasant hours,
however, and does not realize why they pass so quickly. His little
world seems large to him and all his experiences great in their
importance. A ten-acre meadow appears like a boundless prairie, and a
half-mile wide piece of woods an unbounded forest.

On one side of the farm is a clear stream known as Ragged Brook, that,
starting among the foothills of a low mountain range, laughs and
chatters, leaps and tumbles, down the hills, through the gorges and over
the ledges as if endowed with life. Since he is not blessed with
brothers or sisters, this, together with the woods, the birds and
squirrels, becomes his companion. The first trout he ever catches in
this brook seems a monster and never afterward does one pull quite so
hard. Isolated as he is, and having none but his elders for company, he
talks to the creatures of the field and forest as if they could
understand him, and he watches their ways and habits and tries to make
them his friends. He is a lonely boy, and seldom sees others of his age,
so that perhaps when he does they make a more distinct impression on his
mind.

One day he is allowed to go to the mill with his father, and it is an
event in his life he never forgets. The old brown mill with its big
wheel splashing in the cle