soon as ever he got big enough.




VIII

THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING

One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts,
hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after
the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken
them, and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright
October day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is
nothing quite so exhilarating as going nutting. Nor is the pleasure
of it altogether destroyed for the boy by the consideration that he
is making himself useful in obtaining supplies for the winter
household. The getting-in of potatoes and corn is a different thing;
that is the prose, but nutting is the poetry, of farm life. I am not
sure but the boy would find it very irksome, though, if he were
obliged to work at nut-gathering in order to procure food for the
family. He is willing to make himself useful in his own way. The
Italian boy, who works day after day at a huge pile of pine-cones,
pounding and cracking them and taking out the long seeds, which are
sold and eaten as we eat nuts (and which are almost as good as
pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the Italians), probably does not
see the fun of nutting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy here were set at
pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening the prickly chestnut-burs
as a task, he would think himself an ill-used boy. What a hardship
the prickles in his fingers would be! But now he digs them out with