field
hills. In one of the woody valleys rain-clouds have formed a mirage,
another seeming lake, and from its bosom rise to the clear, fine air of
the hills the muffled clangor and whistle of the New York Central train,
in the boy's mind a glittering image fleeing to splendid cities, and one
that he longs to follow.

A boy has no perception whatsoever of the poetry of farm-life: he
considers a woodman's work crabbed prose. The idea of making poetry out
of any part of it, or out of a herder's work either, is to him stark
idiocy. Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring
day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which he makes
"ridgy" work and endures the horror of seeing the gentle, thin-skinned
creatures bleed under his awkward shears. The boy cannot conceive what
poetry there is about oxen. From the moment a calf hides in the hay with
its mother's help, and makes believe there is no calf born yet, until it
becomes an ox, it cannot for an instant be considered poetic by a boy.
The calf is a creature that insists, whenever it drinks, on thrusting
its head to the bottom of the pail with a splash that deluges the boy
with milk: it drinks until it is out of breath, and then withdraws its
head with another splash and an explosion of milk-steam from its
nostrils--performances which cause the boy's friends to remark wherever
he goes, "You smell of sour milk." The boy likes well enough to feed the
oxen their full measures of meal; he likes to see them get down on their
knees to lick up morsels that roll into corners of the stable-floor; he
stretches his hand in before them for little balls of meal they cannot
reach with their long tongues, at which they draw back with a thwack
against the stanchion, breathing hard and gazing at him with their large
black eyes; and when the off ox tries to capture the nigh ox's portion,
the boy raps him back to his place. Quite a pastoral friendship exists
between the boy and the nigh ox, which, being continually bullied by the
off ox, needs the boy's protection, and is therefore placed next him at
work. But, for all that, he does not see the romance of such matters.

The yoking of oxen is decidedly not matter for a flying smile to a boy.
He lays one end of the yoke's beam on the ground, lifts the other end
with his right hand, and, waving one of the ox-bows in his left, cries
to the nigh ox, "Come under!" The "nigh" slowly obeys, bending its head
low to acco