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Spring came to the settlers on Sun Prairie with a wonderful message, like a pardon to imprisoned people. For five months they had been shut closely within their cabins. Nothing could be sweeter than the joy they felt when the mild south wind began to blow and the snow began to sink away, leaving warm, brown patches of earth in the snowy fields. It seemed that the sun god had not forsaken them, after all.
The first island to appear in the midst of the ocean of slush and mud around the Stewart house was the chip pile; and there the spring work began. As soon as the slush began to gather, Jack, the hired man, was set to work each morning, digging ditches and chopping canals in the ice so that the barn would not be inundated by the spring rains. During the middle of the day he busied himself at sawing and splitting the pile of logs which Mr.Stewart had been hauling during the open days of winter.
Jack came from far lands, and possessed, as Lincoln soon discovered,unusual powers of dancing and playing the fiddle. He brought, also, stirring stories of distant forests, strange people, and many battles; and Lincoln,who had an eye for character, set himself to work to distinguish between what the hired man knew, what he thought he knew, and what he merely lied about.
There was plenty of work for the boys. They had cows to milk and the drains to keep open. It was their business also to pile the wood behind the men as they sawed and split the large logs into short lengths. They used a crosscut saw, which made pleasant music in the still, warm air of springtime.Afterwards these pieces, split into small sticks ready for the stove, were thrown into a conical heap, which it was Lincoln’s business to repile in shapely ricks.
Boys always insist upon having entertainment, even in their work, and Lincoln found amusement in planning a new ditch and in seeing it remove the puddle before the barn door. There was a certain pleasure also in piling wood neatly and rapidly, and in watching the deft and powerful swing of the shining axes, as they lifted and fell, and rose again in the hands of the strong men. Then, too, the sap began to flow out of the maple logs, and Lincoln and Owen wore their tongues to the quick, licking the trickle from the rough wood. They also stripped out the inner bark of the elm logs and chewed it.It had a sweet, nut-like flavor, and was considered most excellent forage.
It was back-breaking work, piling wood, and the boys could not have endured it had it not been for the companionship of the men and the hope they had of going skating at night.
Every hour of free time was improved by Lincoln and Rance and Milton,for they knew by experience how transitory the skating season was. Early in the crisp spring air, when the trees hung thick with frost, transforming the earth into fairy-land, and the cloudless sky was blue as a plowshare, they clattered away to the nearest pond, where the jay and the snowbird dashed amid the glorified willow trees, and the ice outspread like a burnished share.On such mornings the air was so crisp and still it seemed the whole earth waited for the sun.
At night during the full moon nearly all the boys and girls of the neighborhood met, to rove up and down the long swales and to play “gool”or “pom, pom, pull away” upon the frozen ponds. These games could be played with skates quite as well as in any other way. There was a singular charm in these excursions across the plain at night, or winding up the swales filled with imprisoned and icebound water. Lincoln and Rance often skated off alone and in silence, far away from the others, and the majesty of the night fell upon them with a light which silenced and made them afraid.
There was a singular charm about this time of the year. Travel was quite impossible, for the frost had left the roads bottomless; and so upon the chip pile the boys sat to watch the snow disappear from the fields and draw sullenly away from the russet grass to take a final stand at the fence corners and in the hedges. They watched the ducks as they came straggling back in long flocks, lighting in the cornfields to find food. They came in enormous numbers, sometimes so great the sky seemed darkened with them, and when they alighted on the fields, they covered the ground like some strange, downdropping storm from the sky, and when alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of thunder. At times the lines were so long that those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in the rear were dim clouds beneath the southern sun. Many brant and geese also passed, and it was always a pleasure to Lincoln to see these noble birds pushing their way boldly into the north. He could imitate their cries, and often caused them to turn and waver in their flight, by uttering their resounding cries.
One day in late March at the close of a warm sunny day (just as the red disk of the sun was going down in a cloudless sky in the west) , down from a low hilltop, and thrilling through the misty, wavering atmosphere, came a singular, soft, joyous, “boom, boom, boom, cutta, cutta, war-whoop!”
“Hooray!” shouted Lincoln. “Spring is here.”
“What was that?” asked the hired man. “That? Why that’s the prairie chicken. It means it is spring!”
There is no sweeter sound in the ears of a prairie-born man than the splendid morning chorus of these noble birds, for it is an infallible sign that winter has broken at last. The drum of the prairie cock carries with it a thousand associations of warm sun and springing grass, which thrill the heart with massive joy of living. It is almost worth while to live through a long unbroken Western winter just for the exquisite delight which comes with the first exultant phrase of the vernal symphony.
Day by day this note is taken by others, until the whole horizon rings with the jocund call of hundreds of cocks and the whooping cries of thousands of hens, as they flock and dance about on the bare earth of the ridges. Here they battle for their mates, and strut about till the ground is beaten hard and smooth with their little feet.
About this time the banking was taken away from the house, and the windows, which had been sealed up for five months, were opened. It was a beautiful moment to Lincoln, when they sat at dinner in the kitchen, with the windows and doors wide open to the warm wind, and the sunshine floating in upon the floor. The hens caw-cawing, in a mounting ecstasy of greeting to the spring, voiced something he had never felt before.
As the wood pile took shape, Mr. Stewart called upon Lincoln and the hired man to help fan up the seed wheat. This the boys hated because it was a dusty and monotonous job. It was of no use to cry out; the work had to be done, and so, on a bright afternoon, while Jack turned the crank of the mill,Lincoln dipped wheat from the bin into the hopper or held the sacks for his father to fill. It seemed particularly hard to be confined there in the dust and noise, while out in the splendid sunlight the ducks were flying, the prairie chickens calling, and the ice was cracking and booming under the ring of the skaters’ steel.
Another diversion of the boys at this season of the year was the hiding of Easter eggs. The hiding of eggs for Easter was a curious custom, quite common among the children of the settlers from New York and the Middle States. The avowed purpose was to lay up a supply of eggs for Easter Sunday. But as they were always extremely plentiful at this season of the year, and almost worthless, the motive must be sought deeper down.Perhaps it was a survival of some old-world superstitions. Anyhow, Lincoln and his brother Owen began to hide eggs in all sorts of out-of-the-way places for fully three weeks before Easter Sunday.
It was understood by Mr. Stewart that if he could discover their hiding places the eggs might be confiscated, and he made elaborate pretense of searching for them. One of the shrewd ways in which the boys made concealment was by lifting a flake of hay from the stack and making a hole beneath it. Upon letting the flake of weatherbeaten thatch fall back into place, all signs of the nest disappeared. As the hens were laying a great many eggs each day, it was very difficult for Mrs. Stewart to tell how many the boys were hiding—she did not greatly care.
In his meetings with Milton and Rance, Lincoln compared notes, as to numbers, and together the four boys planned their Easter outing. Day after day Mr. Stewart, to the great dread of the boys, went poking about, close to the very spot where the eggs were hidden, and twice he found a small “nest.”But this only added to the value of those remaining and stimulated the boys to yet other and more skillful devices in concealment.
They were able, in spite of his search, to save up several dozens of eggs,which they triumphantly brought to light on Easter morning, with gusty shouts of laughter over the pretended dismay of their parents.
With these eggs packed in a pail and with a few biscuits and some salt and pepper, Lincoln and Owen started out to meet their companions. Rance and Milton; together they all set forth toward the distant belt of forest in which Burr Oak Creek ran.
There, in the warm spring sun, on the grassy bank beside the stream they built their fire and cooked their eggs for their mid-day meal. Some they boiled, others they roasted in the ashes. Rance caught a chub or two from the brook, which added a wild savor to the meal, but eggs were considered a necessary order of the day; all else was by the way.
Something primeval and splendid clustered about this unusual camp fire. Around them were bare trees, with buds just beginning to swell. The grass was green only in the sunny nooks, but the sky was filled with soft white clouds. For guests they had the squirrels and the blue jays. It was a celebration of their escape from the bonds of winter and a greeting to spring. There was no conscious feeling in this feast, as far as the boys were concerned. But the deep-down explanation was this: they had gone back to the worship of the Anglo-Saxon divinity of spring; they had returned to the primitive, to the freedom of the savage, not knowing that the egg was the symbol of regenerate Nature.
As a matter of fact, the flavor of these eggs was not good; the burned shell had a disagreeable odor, and the boys would have been very sorry if Mrs. Stewart had served up for them anything so disagreeable of flavor.But the curl of smoke from the grass with which they started the fire, the scream of the jay, the hawk sweeping by overhead, the touch of ashes on their tongues, the smell of the growing grass, and the sky above made it all wonderful and wild and very sweet. When at night they returned, tired and sleepy, to the warmly-lighted kitchen and to mother, they considered the day well spent, uniting as it did the pleasures of both civilization and barbarism.
( Hamlin Garland )
Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was born in Wisconsin. His father was a farmer pioneer, who, lured by the hope of cheaper acres, better soil and bigger crops, moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota, from Minnesota to Iowa, and from Iowa to Dakota. When Hamlin Garland turned his attention to literature, he was keen enough to see the literary value of his early experiences. He resolved to interpret truthfully the life of the western farmer and its great hardships and limitations, no less than its hopes, joys, and achievements. This selection is taken from Boy Life on the Prairie.
inundated : flooded, made too bus
conical : cone shaped
transitory : brief
swales : small valleys
infallible : sure
ecstasy : happy outburst, great joy confiscate: seized, taken away
A) Answer the following questions.
1) How did the settlers on the Sun Prairie feel at the coming of spring? Why?
2) What was the first outdoor work of the spring? Why do you think this was the first work to be done
3) Would you like to do the boys’ part of this work? Why or why not?
4) How do we know that Lincoln was very interested in nature?
5) What work did Lincoln have to do that he disliked?
6) What would the result be if all the boys and girls worked as hard as Lincoln?
B) Vocabulary practice—Choose 5 words from the word list and use them in sentences of your own.
1) ___________________________________________________________________
2) ___________________________________________________________________
3) ___________________________________________________________________
4) ___________________________________________________________________
5) ___________________________________________________________________
C) Summary—Write a short summary of this story.