f woolly clouds,
The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind
With rippling wings that quiver not for flight
But only joy, or yielding to its will
Runs down, a brook of laughter through the air."

After the charm of the novelty of the scene had vanished, I descended
from my perch to explore this sleepy hollow: the barn door hung
suspended on a single hinge, like a bird with but one unbroken wing to
soar upon. The swallows twittered their love-songs under the eaves;
chipmunks scolded my intrusion and threw nuts at my head from the
beams; a lone, lorn hen proclaimed her triumph over a new laid egg,
and then, with fiery eyes, assaulted me with profanity as I filled
my hat with her choicest treasures. A litter of pigs scampered away,
wedging themselves into a hole in the wall, and hung there kicking and
squealing, while their indignant mother chased me up a ladder where
she hurled at me the vilest imprecations; a solitary Phoebe bird
wailed out her plaintive "pee wee, pee wee, pee whi itt," and a
newly-married pair of sandpipers chanted their song of the sea on the
edge of a mud puddle in the yard.

At last the infuriated sow went to liberate her wedged-in offspring,
leaving me to flee to the house where I cooked my eggs and some
ancient potatoes in the ashes of a fire smoldering in the wide old
fireplace. I have since eaten royal dinners in palatial hotels, but
nothing has ever tasted half as good as this extemporized lunch of my
boyhood.

Here the rest of the family found me later when they came bringing
their household goods; here I might have laid, broad and deep, the
foundations of a useful life, had I possessed even a modicum of the
stick-to-itiveness so essential to success.

A limited amount of discontent is a powerful stimulus to more
strenuous endeavor; but when you have intensity without continuity of
mental action, beware of imitating my example of progressing along the
lines of the least resistance; for if you do you will never attain
to that persistency of effort which can come only from overcoming
obstacles.

When my father gave me a moderate task of weeding onions, I soon
became tired of crawling on hands and knees under a scorching sun,
inundating the earth with perspiration and tears, so I substituted a
hoe for fingers, tearing up onions with the weeds that I might the
sooner secure unlimited rheumatism by bathing in the brook. Had
my father given me what he earnestly desired, and what I rich