1905.] THE COUNTRY BOY. 23 



used to do are not done at all any more in these days. Turn- 

 ing the grindstone for grinding scythes during haying. There 

 are no more scythes. Are there any grindstones ? If so, who 

 is to turn them? And it has been pointed out, I think by 

 Mr. Charles D. Warner, in the same book, that it is an inevita- 

 ble indication that an old man has reached his second childhood 

 when he is asked to turn the grindstone. There are a few 

 things, and only two or three, in my life, of which I am proud, 

 and I think the proudest experience of my life was this one, 

 when as a boy I developed a precocious ability to grind the 

 scythe, and especially when my father said to me " I believe 

 you can grind a scythe better than I can do it." From that 

 day he turned the grindstone and I ground the scythes. I 

 am quite sure that I have never since done anything quite as 

 well as I used to grind scythes, and nothing ever gave me such 

 sincere and unalloyed pleasure as to bear hard upon the stone 

 and see my father wonder what made that stone go with such 

 difficulty. (Laughter.) But that old farm life, and that old 

 village life in the Connecticut country towns, and in the New 

 England country towns, what a splendid thing it was. I do 

 not know whether there have ever been any finer people than 

 the farmers of Connecticut, of the generation that has gone or 

 that is about disappearing, unless it be the farmers who are 

 gathered here today. The life that the old-fashioned farmers 

 lived was full of hardships, and how on earth some of the work 

 was done I cannot see ! There was not very much money in 

 it, and the farmers seldom had any considerable amount, even 

 for them, except once or twice a year, and especially in the fall, 

 when the farmers sold their pork. I do not know how many 

 hundreds of dollars in actual cash passed through the old 

 leather pocketbooks, those old worn leather pocketbooks with 

 a strap around them, that everybody used to carry in those 

 days, but there is one thing that I am sure of, and that is, that 

 in the houses there was culture — books and reading, an 

 appreciation of the high things of life ; an understanding of the 

 intellectual life ; an interest that the schools should be the best 

 possible, though I must say if we take the glory of reminiscence 

 from them they were not very good schools, but in the interest 

 that the schools should be the best that they could be under the 

 conditions, an interest in the support of the churches, and an 

 ardent desire that if there was, here and there, a bright boy or 



