birch and alder
trees that grow in the swamps, and used for hoops on lime casks; at this
time they were worth a half a cent a piece delivered. I would work cutting
these poles at times when I could do nothing else, pack them on my back to
the road, pile them up, till I had a quantity to sell. At length I
concluded I had enough to buy me a horse and cart; the pile seemed as big
as a house to me, but when the man came along to buy them, he counted out
six thousand good ones and rejected nine thousand that were bad. "Too
small!" he said.

"Too small?" I exclaimed, "why there is hardly any difference in them!"
But he was buying, I was selling, and under the influence of a boy's
anxiety, he paid me thirty dollars, which I counted over and over again,
and at every count the dollars seemed to murmer, "A horse, a horse!--war!
war! to the front! be a soldier!" I could picture nothing but a soldier's
life; I could almost hear the sounds of the drums, and almost see the long
rows of blue-coated soldiers marching in glorious array with steady step
to the music of the band. "Thirty! thirty!" I would repeat to myself, but
finally concluded thirty wouldn't buy much of a horse, but my heart was
set upon it, and nothing remained for me to do but cut more "poles." One
day when I arrived at the road with a bundle of them, a farmer happened
to be passing, driving a yoke of oxen as I tumbled my hoop-poles over the
fence on to the pile.

"Heow be yer?" Addressing me in a high, nasal twang peculiar to the
yeomanry of Maine, and then calling to his oxen without a change of tone,
he drawled, "Whoa! back! Whoa you, Turk! Whoa, Bright!" at the same time
hitting the oxen over their noses with his goad-stick, and resting on the
yoke, he asked, "What yer goin' ter dew with them poles?"

"Sell them," I replied.

"What dew yer want for 'em?" taking in the height and width of the pile
with a calculating eye.

"Fifty cents a hundred," I said, with some trepidation.

"Don't want nothin', dew yer," coming over and picking out the smallest
pole in the pile; "Pooty durned small, been't they? What'll yer take fur
the hull lot?"

"Twenty dollars," I said.

"Twenty dollars! Whew!" Emitting a whistle that would have done credit to
a locomotive exhausting steam. "Why, thar been't more'n a thousan' thar,
be thar?"

"Oh yes, I guess there are over four thousand."

"Say!" sticking his hands in either breeches pocket and taking me in from
head to foot