rtheless, I worked hard at the gun, and by the time that I had
sent all the church-roof gutters, so far as I honestly could cut them,
through the red pine-door, I began to long for a better tool that would
make less noise and throw straighter. But the sheep-shearing came and
the hay-season next, and then the harvest of small corn, and the digging
of the root called "batata" (a new but good thing in our neighbourhood,
which our folk have made into "taties"), and then the sweating of the
apples, and the turning of the cider-press, and the stacking of the
firewood, and netting of the woodcocks, and the springles to be
minded in the garden and by the hedgerows, where blackbirds hop to the
molehills in the white October mornings, and grey 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.

How the year went by I know not, only that I was abroad all day,
shooting, or fishing, or minding the farm, or riding after some stray
beast, or away by the seaside below Glenthorne, wondering at the great
waters, and resolving to go for a sailor. For in those days I had a firm
belief, as many other strong boys have, of being born for a seaman. And
indeed I had been in a boat nearly twice; but the second time mother
found it out, and came and drew me back again; and after that she cried
so badly, that I was forced to give my word to her to go no more without
telling her.

But Betty Muxworthy spoke her mind quite in a different way about it,
the while she was wringing my hosen, and clattering to the drying-horse.

"Zailor, ees fai! ay and zarve un raight. Her can't kape out o' the
watter here, whur a' must goo vor to vaind un, zame as a gurt to-ad
squalloping, and mux up till I be wore out, I be, wi' the very saight of
's braiches. How wil un ever baide aboard zhip, wi' the watter zinging
out under un, and comin' up splash when the wind blo