The experience in these several states gave Hamlin Garland an excellent opportunity to understand all phases of country life. He has expressed his observations in description of boys' games, the labor on the farm, the work of the rural school, and the varied activities of the rural community. He knew that the work of the farm in an early day furnished as much opportunity for the display of resistance and the determination to use the last bit of strength to win as does the game of the present. The work of binding the wheat after a reaper became a game requiring honesty as well as skill and rapidity. Perhaps no boy of today shoots a basket, makes a touch-down, or hits out a home run with more pride than did the youth of this pioneer life retire from the harvest field at noon or night with the consciousness that he had bound all his "tricks" without being caught once by the machine as it made its successive rounds of the field. Hamlin Garland knew the joys of these contests on the pioneer farm, and he also knew the sordid side of the narrow and cramped life of the early settler. He describes both with equal vividness and sympathy. Wisconsin owes him much for the work he has done in preserving pictures of her early pioneer life. His hero and heroine are those ancestors who travelled forth into the new regions in covered wagons, and by the use of axe and plow conquered a seemingly unconquerable forest or a stubborn prairie sod. In his book of short stories, "Main Travelled Roads," he makes the dedication of it to his heroic parents in these words: "To my father and mother, whose half-century pilgrimage on the main travelled road of life has brought them only toil and deprivation, this book of stories is dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." To illustrate Mr. Garland's ability to picture the joyous and the irksome in the life of the pioneer two selections are given at this place. The first sets forth the joy of farm activity, the second, the disheartening influence of abject toil. [Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND] HAYING TIME From "BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE." Published by permission of Harper Bros. Haying was the one season of farm work which the boys thoroughly enjoyed. It usually began on the tame meadows about the twenty-fifth of June, and lasted a week or so. It had always appealed to Lincoln,[1] in a distinctly beautiful and poetic sense, which was not true of the main business of farming. Most of the duties through which he passed needed the lapse of years to seem beautiful in his eyes, but haying had a charm and significance quite out of the common.