When I appeared in the village with my basket of
small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and call
after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so
early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for
sugar, and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in
the face of my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own
eyes upon them. I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money
as that was I should become a miser.
Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery,
and haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way
off; picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited
my hands and my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in
the spring meadows with my long-handled knocker, about the time
the first swallow was heard laughing overhead, was real fun. I
always wanted some element of play in my work; buckling down to
any sort of routine always galled me, and does yet. The work must
be a kind of adventure, and permit of sallies into free fields.
Hence the most acceptable work for me was to be sent strawberrying
or raspberrying by Mother; but the real fun was to go fishing up
Montgomery Hollow, or over on Rose's Brook, this necessitating a
long tramp, and begetting a hunger in a few hours that made a piece
of rye bread the most delectable thing in the world; yet a pure
delight that never sated.
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