of Hingham has its own reward,--and when you can say that of any labor
you are speaking of its poetry.

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and
turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years
ago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds
have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle
stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet
birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes
between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing
and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump
you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you
under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig.
You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are;
you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy
capers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods and
the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays
and the crows?

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees;
the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of
the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile,
thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm
glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if
it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He that
rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is merciful
to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket
of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten
o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through
and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud,
and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in
his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to
hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of
his leaf-bed, far