e men got up and sat on their sacks of corn. The other
horses walked on all right with them, but Johnny's horses wouldn't move,
not one step while he was on top of the load. Well, my dear, he called
for the rest to come and help him--to see if the horses would go for
them. But they would not move one step, though they whipped them and
shouted at them to start on, for Johnny he was as heavy as lead. And he
had to get down. Soon as he got down, the horses seemed glad and went
off on a gallop after the rest of the train. So they all went off
together, and Johnny wandered away into the bogs. His friends supposed,
of course, he was coming on, thought he was walking beside his load; the
snow was falling down, and perhaps they were a little afraid. He was
left behind. They scoured the country for him next day, and, bedad, they
found him, stiff dead, sitting against a fence. There's where they found
him. They brought him on a door to his mother. Oh, it was a sad thing to
see--to see her cry and hear her mourn!"

"And what more?" I asked.

"That's all. He was waked and buried, and that's what he got for playing
cards! And that's all as true as ever could be true, for it's myself
knew the old mother, and she told me it her very self, and she cried
many tears for her son."

CHAPTER VII.

DAILY DISTRACTIONS.

But the sheep shearing came, and the hay season next, and then the
harvest of small corn ... then the sweating of the apples, and the
turning of the cider mill and the stacking of the firewood, and
netting of the wood-cocks, and the springes to be mended in the
garden and by the hedgerows, where the blackbirds hop to the
molehills in the white October mornings and gray birds come to look
for snails at the time when the sun is rising. It is wonderful how
Time runs away when all these things, and a great many others, come
in to load him down the hill, and prevent him from stopping to look
about. And I, for my part, can never conceive how people who live in
towns and cities, where neither lambs nor birds are (except in some
shop windows), nor growing corn, nor meadow grass, nor even so much
as a stick to cut, or a stile to climb and sit down upon--how these
poor folk get through their lives without being utterly weary of
them, and dying from pure indolence, is a thing God only knows, if
his mercy allows him to think of it.

LORNA DOONE.

A farm-h