ON THE RECOLLECTIONS OF A HIRED MAN 555 



As children, we used to number the years on the farm by the 

 " hands" we had employed, much as nations mark their calendars 

 by their changes of kings. There was the year of Will Williams, 

 the years of Owen Williams, the summer we hired Bill Jones, the 

 interregnum which followed the turning off of Bob Peters, and 

 so on. One of the marked characteristics of American farm life 

 is its democracy, and this is well illustrated by the relations which 

 exist between employer and hired man. Often the son of a 

 neighboring farmer, the "hand" enjoys the same consideration 

 as that received by a member of the family. He sits at the same 

 table, and shares in the dishes as early and often as the other 

 men of the family. He probably would be asked to join in the 

 evening game of- checkers or authors, if there were any evening 

 between summer chores and bedtime. He has a voice in family 

 debates regarding the election of a new schoolma'am, and his 

 opinion is of weight in the discussion of current politics or the 

 proper time for weaning calves. His joys are those of his em- 

 ployers and his sorrows their sorrows. A discussion of these 

 sorrows I have reserved for a separate chapter, The Sorrows of 

 the Hired Man. 



In my preface I dwelt sufficiently on the physical ills contingent 

 on farm life, and I need mention them no further. Considering 

 the wholesomeness of out-of-door work, they are probably less 

 than those of young men of any other profession. The ill that I 

 shall describe I ought, perhaps, to classify as a psychological one, 

 that sorrow of the hired man occasioned by the bashful conscious- 

 ness of being a farm hand an evil, like his joys, not peculiar to 

 his condition, but shared by his foster-brothers, the sons of the 

 family. This feeling does not disturb ordinarily, but intrudes only 

 on occasions when he is contrasted with people who walk in dain- 

 tier paths. One of these occasions arrives when a town girl comes 

 out to spend a week with an older daughter of his employer, in 

 response, possibly, to an invitation made when both girls were 

 students in the Normal. Then the hired man suddenly realizes 

 how great his hands have grown, and how awfully his boots 

 sound on the uncarpeted floor. The croquet mallet becomes a 

 maul in his fingers, and his tongue is the tongue of an ox. His 



