BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

Say what you will about the general usefulness of boys, it is my
impression that a farm without a boy would very soon come to
grief. What the boy does is the life of the farm. He is the
factotum, always in demand, always expected to do the thousand
indispensable things that nobody else will do. Upon him fall all
the odds and ends, the most difficult things.

After everybody else is through, he has to finish up. His work is
like a woman's,--perpetually waiting on others. Everybody knows
how much easier it is to eat a good dinner than it is to wash the
dishes afterward. Consider what a boy on a farm is required to
do; things that must be done, or life would actually stop.

It is understood, in the first place, that he is to do all the
errands, to go to the store, to the post office, and to carry all
sorts of messages. If he had as many legs as a centiped, they
would tire before night. His two short limbs seem to him entirely
inadequate to the task. He would like to have as many legs as a
wheel has spokes, and rotate about in the same way.

This he sometimes tries to do; and the people who have seen him
"turning cart wheels" along the side of the road, have supposed
that he was amusing himself and idling his time; he was only
trying to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he could
economize his legs, and do his errands with greater dispatch.

He practices standing on his head, in order to accustom himself
to any position. Leapfrog is one of his methods of getting over