HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.
Those who were so unfortunate as to have been born and brought up in the
city know nothing about that chapter in a boy's history of which I speak.
About a month before Easter there comes to the farmhouse a scarcity of
eggs. The farmer's wife begins to abuse the weasels and the cats as the
probable cause of the paucity. The feline tribe are assaulted with many a
harsh "Scat!" on the suspicion of their fondness for omelets in the raw.
Custards fail from the table. The Dominick hens are denounced as not worth
their mush. Meanwhile, the boys stand round the corner in a broad grin at
what is the discomfiture of the rest of the family.
The truth must be told that the boys, in anticipation of Easter, have, in
some hole in the mow or some barrel in the wagon-house, been hiding eggs.
If the youngsters understand their business, they will compromise the
matter, and see that at least a small supply goes to the house every day.
Too great greed on the part of the boy will discover the whole plot, and
the charge will be made: "De Witt, I believe you are hiding the eggs!"
Forthwith the boy is collared and compelled to disgorge his possessions.
Now, there is nothing more trying to a boy than, after great care in
accumulating these shelly resources, to have to place them in a basket and
bring them forth to the light two weeks before Easter. Boys, therefore,
manage with skill and dexterity. At this season of the year you see them
lurking much about the hayrick and the hay-loft. You see them crawling out
from stacks of straw and walking away rapidly with their hands behind them.
They look very innocent, for I have noticed that the look of innocence in
boys is proportioned to the amount of mischief with which they are stuffed.
They seem to be determined to risk their lives on mow-poles where the hay
lies thin. They come out from under the stable floor in a despicable state
of toilet, and cannot give any excuse for their depreciation of apparel.
Hens flutter off the nest with an unusual squawk, for the boys cannot wait
any longer for the slow process of laying, and hens have no business to
stand in the way of Easter. The most tedious hours of my boyhood were spent
in waiting for a hen to get off her nest. No use to scare her off, for then
she will get mad, and just as like as not take the egg with her. Indeed, I
think the boy is excusable for his haste if his brother has a dozen eggs
and he has only eleven.
At this season of the year the hens are melancholy. They want to hatch, but
how can they? They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and
the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs. With that deficit,
they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy's approaches. Many a boy
has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand,
inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see
what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no
suspicion as to the nature of his expedition. Immediately over the hen's
head comes the boy's cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over
the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.
But at last the evening before Easter comes. While the old people are on
the piazza the children come in with the accumulated treasures of many
weeks, and put down the baskets. Eggs large and small, white-shelled and
brown, Cochin-Chinas and Brahmapooters. The character of the hens is
vindicated. The cat may now lie in the sun without being kicked by false
suspicions. The surprised exclamation of parents more than compensates the
boys for the strategy of long concealment. The meanest thing in the world
is for father and mother not to look surprised in such circumstances.
It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the
household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole
enterprise is shipwrecked. From our own experience, it is very difficult to
pick up eggs after you have once dropped them. You have found the same
experience in after life. Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on
Wall street. You had gathered them up. You were bringing them in. You
expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the
consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the
basket, and the eggs broke. Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down
to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests
and invited a new laying.
It is sometimes found on Easter morning that the eggs have been kept too
long. The boy's intentions were good enough, but the enterprise had been
too protracted, and the casting out of the dozen was sudden and
precipitate. Indeed, that is the trouble with some older boys I wot of.
They keep their money, or their brain, or their influence hidden till it
rots. They are not willing to come forth day by day on a humble mission,
doing what little good they may, but are keeping themselves hidden till
some great Easter-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church
and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties
ruined. Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a
poor man's table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of
Lords.
That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the
saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the
entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had
anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were
your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled,
eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs
in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter
morning in boyhood.
Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them on stilts, and they buy
their eggs out of the store. There is no room for a boy to swing round.
There is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle a hoop, or even
shout without people's throwing up the window to see who is killed. The
holidays are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre will persist
in telling him who Santa Claus is, while yet he is hanging up his first
pair of stockings. Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume
as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing but the trouble of
breathing it, he may smell a country full of new-mown hay and wild
honeysuckle. In a painted bath-tub he takes his Saturday bath careful lest
he hit his head against the spigot, while in the meadow-brook the boys
plunge in wild glee, and pluck up health and long life from the pebbly
bottom. Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing of mother
to let you take off your shoes, you dash out on the cool grass barefoot, or
down the road, the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment, and,
henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes to tie or blacken.
Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If
their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good
time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how
to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to
the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an
extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch
the prodigy, and wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren. It
will be a good thing when the evenings are short, and the old folks'
eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up in their house for a little
while one or two of these lights of childhood. For the time the aches and
pains of old age will be gone, and they will feel as lithe and merry as
when sixty years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow and
wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.