Pocket Island: A Story of Country Life in New EnglandMunn, Charles Clark
General
Pocket Island: A Story of Country Life in New England
Munn, Charles Clark
New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The country boy has so much the greater chance for enjoyment and is not
so soon warped by restrictions and tarnished by the sewers of vice. He
has deep forests, wide meadows and pure brooks to play in; and if his
feet grow broad from lack of shoes, he hears the song of birds, the
whispers of winds in the trees, and knows the scent of new-mown hay and
fresh water lilies, the beauty of flowers, green fields and shady woods.
He learns how apples taste eaten under the tree, nuts cracked in the
woods, sweet cider as it runs from the press, and strawberries picked in
the orchard while moist with dew. All these delights are a closed book
to the city boy. The country boy is surrounded by pure and wholesome
influences and grows to be a better man for it. The wide range of forest
and field, pure air, sweet water, plenty of sun and rain are all his,
and worth ten times the chance for life, health, enjoyment and a good
character than ever comes to the city boy. He may sooner learn to smoke
or gather a choice selection of profane and vulgar words; he may have
smaller feet and better clothes, but he often fails in attaining a
healthy body and pure mind and never knows what a royal, wide-open
chance for enjoying boyhood days he has missed. He never knows the
delight of wading barefoot down a mountain brook where the clear water
leaps over mossy ledges and where he can pull trout from every
foam-flecked pool! He never realizes the charming suspense of lying upon
the grassy bank of a meadow stream and snaring a sucker, or what fun it
is to enter a chestnut grove just after frost and rain have covered the
ground with brown nuts, or setting traps, shaking apple trees, or
gathering wild grapes! He never rode to the cider-mill on a load of
apples and had the chance to shy one at every bird and squirrel on the
way; or when winter came, to slide down hill when the slide was a
half-mile field of crusted snow! All these and many other delights he
never knows; but one thing he does know, and knows it early, and that is
how much smarter, better dressed and better off in every way he is than
the poor, despised greeny of a country boy! He may, it is true, go early
to the theatre and look at half-nude actresses loaded with diamonds, but
he never sees a twenty-acre cedar pasture just after an ice storm when
the morning sun shines fair upon it!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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