Autobiographies; Boys -- Biography; Country life; New England
This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun usually,
and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been wanted
for taking the family to meeting. It was so peaceful and still in the
pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so playful, the
colts never so frisky. Round and round the lot the boy went calling, in
an entreating Sunday voice, “Jock, jock, jock, jock,” and shaking his
salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect, and shaking tails and
flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and gave the boy a pretty
good race before he could coax the nose of one of them into his dish.
The boy got angry, and came very near saying “dum it,” but he rather
enjoyed the fun, after all.
The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety was divided between the set
of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory of the
Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was through the
house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept running hither and
thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or
to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch of caraway-seed.
Already the deacon's mare, with a wagon-load of the deacon's folks, had
gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up
clouds of dust, while the good deacon sat jerking the reins, in an
automatic way, and the “womenfolks” patiently saw the dust settle upon
their best summer finery. Wagon after wagon went along the sandy
road, and when our boy's family started, they became part of a long
procession, which sent up a mile of dust and a pungent, if not pious
smell of buffalo-robes. There were fiery horses in the trail which had
to be held in, for it was neither etiquette nor decent to pass anybody
on Sunday. It was a great delight to the farmer-boy to see all this
procession of horses, and to exchange sly winks with the other boys, who
leaned over the wagon-seats for that purpose. Occasionally a boy rode
behind, with his back to the family, and his pantomime was always some
thing wonderful to see, and was considered very daring and wicked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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