We may hire our praying and our thinking done for us and still live; but not our chores. They are to the life of the spirit what breathing and eating and sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse,—the friendship of the noble creature; not to “pick up” the eggs yourself, nor hoe your own garden, nor play with your own boys! Why, what is the use of having boys if you are never going to be “it” again, if you are not to be a boy once more along with them! There are some things, the making of our clothes, perhaps, that we must hire done for us. But clothes are not primitive and essential; they are accidental, an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but belonging to a different category from children, gardens, domestic animals, and a domestic home. And yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what a saving, too, of life’s selvage, could we return to the spinning-wheel and loom as we go back to the farm and the daily chores! She, harvest done, to char work did aspire, Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire. And who has not known the same aspiration? has not had a longing for mere chores, and their ample compensation? It is such a reasonable, restful, satisfying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and worry of the day! Then the twilight, and the evening chores, and the soft closing of the door! At dawn we shall go forth again until the evening; but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine discipline of the morning chores. The day should start and stop in our own selves; labor should begin and come to an end in the responsibility of the wholesome, homely round of our own chores. Summer is gone, the harvest is done, and winter is passing on its swiftest days. So swift, indeed, are the days that morning and evening meet, bound up like a sheaf by the circle of the chores. For there is never an end to the chores; never a time when they are all done; never a day when the round of them is not to be done again. And herein lies more of their virtue as a winter cure. Life is not busier here than elsewhere; time is not swifter, but more enjoyable, because so much of life is left unfinished and time is thrown so much more into the future. There is no past on the farm; it is all to come; no sure defeat, but always promise; no settled winter, but always the signs of coming spring.