oy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail
they are nasty brutes--quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling
their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are
greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with
their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose
all their charm--for me.

Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could
keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming
and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly
resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of
the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when
the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of
equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially
at the table.

Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs,
and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as
my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't
work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out
doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard,
getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the
fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some
folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist.

Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the
cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of
unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the
common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from
twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no
sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April
than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they
had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender
spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free
commoners" in the eyes of the law.

The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of
them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the
grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins
with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their
wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom.
Many of them had never felt the