It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a new house, we could at least put on a priming coat. If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting about--“well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.” The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The day promised to be not too depressing for father. As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods. “You wait ’til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.” We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches, made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn. We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay. When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk. We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known. What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she too hoity-toity? We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school, or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” I answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due to my position as a town boy.