When, armed with my long-handled "knocker," I used to be sent forth in the April meadows to beat up and scatter the fall droppings of the cows--the Juno's cushions as Irving named them--I was in much more congenial employment. Had I known the game of golf in those days I should probably have looked upon this as a fair substitute. To stand the big cushions up on edge and with a real golfer's swing hit them with my mallet and see the pieces fly was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were a drag upon my spirits. The spring ploughing and the sowing of the grain and harrowing fell mainly to Father and my older brothers. The spring work was considered done when the oats were sowed and the corn and potatoes planted: the first in early May, the latter in late May. The buckwheat was not sown until late June. One farmer would ask another, "How many oats are you going to sow, or have you sown?" not how many acres. "Oh, fifteen or twenty bushels," would be the answer. The working of the roads came in June after the crops were in. All hands, summoned by the "path master," would meet at a given date, at the end of the district down by the old stone school house--men and boys with oxen, horses, scrapers, hoes, crowbars--and begin repairing the highway. It was not strenuous work, but a kind of holiday that we all enjoyed more or less. The road got fixed after a fashion, here and there--a bridge mended, a ditch cleaned out, the loose stones removed, a hole filled up, or a short section "turnpiked"--but the days were eight-hour days and they did not sit heavy upon us. The state does it much better now with road machinery and a few men. Once or twice a year Father used to send me with a hoe to throw the loose stones out of the road.