The winter season is not all sliding downhill for the farmer-boy, by
any means; yet he contrives to get as much fun out of it as from any
part of the year. There is a difference in boys: some are always
jolly, and some go scowling always through life as if they had a
stone-bruise on each heel. I like a jolly boy.

I used to know one who came round every morning to sell molasses
candy, offering two sticks for a cent apiece; it was worth fifty
cents a day to see his cheery face. That boy rose in the world. He
is now the owner of a large town at the West. To be sure, there are
no houses in it except his own; but there is a map of it, and roads
and streets are laid out on it, with dwellings and churches and
academies and a college and an opera-house, and you could scarcely
tell it from Springfield or Hartford,--on paper. He and all his
family have the fever and ague, and shake worse than the people at
Lebanon; but they do not mind it; it makes them lively, in fact. Ed
May is just as jolly as he used to be. He calls his town Mayopolis,
and expects to be mayor of it; his wife, however, calls the town
Maybe.

The farmer-boy likes to have winter come for one thing, because it
freezes up the ground so that he can't dig in it; and it is covered
with snow so that there is no picking up stones, nor driving the cows
to pasture. He would have a very easy time if it were not for the
getting up before daylight to build the fires and do the "chores."
Nature intended the long winter nights for the farmer-boy to sleep;
but in my day he was expected to open his sleepy eyes when the cock
crew, get out of the warm bed and light a candle, struggle into his
cold pantaloons, and pull on boots in which the thermometer would
have gone down to zero, rake open the coals on the hearth and start