his pillow he yet threw his arms around me and spoke my name many times with marked affection. He died a few days later. I was to him what some of my old teachers were to me--stars that never set below my horizon. My boyish liking for girls was quite different from my liking for boys--there was little or no sense of comradeship in it. When I was eight or nine years old there was one girl in the school toward whom I felt very partial, and I thought she reciprocated till one day I suddenly saw how little she cared for me. The teacher had forbidden us to put our feet upon the seats in front of us. In a spirit of rebellion, I suppose, when the teacher was not looking, I put my brown, soil-stained bare feet upon the forbidden seat. Polly quickly spoke up and said, "Teacher, Johnny Burris put his feet on the seat"--what a blow it was to me for her to tell on me! Like a cruel frost those words nipped the tender buds of my affection and they never sprouted again. Years after, her younger brother married my younger sister, and maybe that unkind cut of our school days kept me from marrying Polly. I had other puppy loves but they all died a natural death. But let me get back to the farm work. The gathering of the things in the sugar bush, when the flow of sap had stopped, usually fell to Eden and me. We would carry the pans and spiles together in big piles, where the oxen and sled could reach them. Then when they were taken to the house it was my mother's and sister's task to get them ready for the milk. The drawing out of the manure and the spring ploughing was the next thing in order on the farm. I took a hand in the former but not in the latter. The spreading of the manure that had been drawn out and placed in heaps in the fields during the winter often fell to me. I remember that I did not bend my back to the work very willingly, especially when the cattle had been bedded with long rye straw, but there were compensations. I could lean on my fork handle and gaze at the spring landscape, I could see the budding trees and listen to the songs of the early birds and maybe catch the note of the first swallow in the air overhead. The farm boy always has the whole of nature at his elbow and he is usually aware of it.