After the morning devotions, which consisted of reading a chapter from the Bible and a prayer always expressed in exactly the same words, he asked a blessing for the meal by this time ready (the blessing was as unvarying as the prayer), and we ate in silence. Then we were warmly clothed, if it was winter, and compelled to go out and work until we were hungry again. I suppose we helped him little enough, but his reasoning convinced him that, to work easily and naturally, work must become a habit, and should be taught from youth up, therefore we went out with him every day and came back only with the darkness. I think he was kinder with us when at work than at any other time, and we admired him in spite of the hard and exacting tasks he gave us to do--he called them stints--for he was powerful and quick to aid us when we needed it, and tender as a child if we were sick. Sometimes on cold days we walked rather than rode to the timber, where my father went to chop wood while Jo and I corded it. On one of these occasions I became ill while returning home at night--a slight difficulty, it must have been, for I was always stout and robust--and he carried me all the way in his arms. Though I insisted I could walk, and was better, he said I was not heavy, and trudged along like a great giant, holding me so tenderly that I thought for the first time that perhaps he loved me. For weeks after that I tried as hard as I could to please him, and to induce him to commend my work; but he never did, for whether I was good or bad, he was just the same, silent and grave, so that if I became indifferent in my tasks, I fear he was the cause of it. Other families had their holidays, and owned guns and dogs, which they used in hunting the wild game then so abundant; but there was little of this at our house, and perhaps this was the reason why we prospered more than those around us. Usually Jo and I were given the Saturday afternoons to ourselves, when we roamed the country with some of the idle vagabonds who lived in rented houses, visiting turkey roosts a great distance in the woods, and only returning long after night-fall. I do not remember that we were ever idle in the middle of the week, unless we were sent on errands, as buying young stock at low prices of the less thrifty neighbors, or something else in which there was profit; so that we had little time to learn anything except hard work, and if we learned that well it was because we were excellently taught by a competent master. During those years work became such a habit with me that ever since it has clung to me, and perhaps, after all, it was an inheritance for which I have reason to be thankful. I remember my father’s saying scornfully to me once, as if intimating that I ought to make up by unusual industry for the years of idleness, that I was a positive burden and expense to him until I was seven years old. So it will readily be imagined that I was put to work early, and kept steadily at it.