"Well, John," replied his father, "you know I can't give ye the
dictionary meanin' of that word any more 'n I can of a great many
others. But I've got a kind of an idee what it means. Probably you don't
remember your Uncle Henry; but I guess if there ever was an optimist, he
was one. Things was always comin' out right with Henry, and especially
anything hard that he had to do; it wa' n't a-goin' to be hard,--'t was
jest kind of solid-pleasant.

"Take hoein' corn, now. If anything ever tuckered me out, 'twas hoein'
corn in the hot sun. But in the field, 'long about the time I begun to
lag back a little, Henry he'd look up an' say:--

"'Good, Jim! When we get these two rows hoed, an' eighteen more, the
piece'll be half done.' An' he'd say it in such a kind of a cheerful way
that I couldn't 'a' ben any more tickled if the piece had been all
done,--an' the rest would go light enough.

"But the worst thing we had to do--hoein corn was a picnic to it--was
pickin' stones. There was no end to that on our old farm, if we wanted
to raise anything. When we wa'n't hurried and pressed with somethin'
else, there was always pickin' stones to do; and there wa'n't a plowin'
but what brought up a fresh crop, an' seems as if the pickin' had all to
be done over again.

"Well, you'd' a' thought, to hear Henry, that there wa'n't any fun in
the world like pickin' stones. He looked at it in a different way from
anybody I ever see. Once, when the corn was all hoed, and the grass
wa'n't fit to cut yet, an' I'd got all laid out to go fishin', and
father he up and set us to pickin' stones up on the west piece, an' I