One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts,
hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after
the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them,
and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright October
day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite
so exhilarating as going nutting. Nor is the pleasure of it altogether
destroyed for the boy by the consideration that he is making himself
useful in obtaining supplies for the winter household. The getting-in of
potatoes and corn is a different thing; that is the prose, but nutting
is the poetry, of farm life. I am not sure but the boy would find it
very irksome, though, if he were obliged to work at nut-gathering in
order to procure food for the family. He is willing to make himself
useful in his own way. The Italian boy, who works day after day at a
huge pile of pine-cones, pounding and cracking them and taking out
the long seeds, which are sold and eaten as we eat nuts (and which are
almost as good as pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the Italians),
probably does not see the fun of nutting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy
here were set at pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening the prickly
chestnut-burs as a task, he would think himself an ill-used boy. What a
hardship the prickles in his fingers would be! But now he digs them out
with his jack-knife, and enjoys the process, on the whole. The boy is
willing to do any amount of work if it is called play.
In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble and industrious than the
boy. I like to see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove; they
leave a desert behind them like the seventeen-year locusts. To climb a
tree and shake it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit, and pass to the
next, is the sport of a brief time. I have seen a legion of boys scamper
over our grass-plot under the chestnut-trees, each one as active as if
he were a new patent picking-machine, sweeping the ground clean of nuts,
and disappear over the hill before I could go to the door and speak
to them about it. Indeed, I have noticed that boys don't care much for
conversation with the owners of fruit-trees. They could speedily make
their fortunes if they would work as rapidly in cotton-fields. I have
never seen anything like it, except a flock of turkeys removing the
grasshoppers from a piece of pasture.
Perhaps it is not generally known that we get the idea of some of
our best military maneuvers from the turkey. The deploying of the
skirmish-line in advance of an army is one of them. The drum-major of
our holiday militia companies is copied exactly from the turkey gobbler;
he has the same splendid appearance, the same proud step, and the same
martial aspect. The gobbler does not lead his forces in the field, but
goes behind them, like the colonel of a regiment, so that he can see
every part of the line and direct its movements. This resemblance is
one of the most singular things in natural history. I like to watch the
gobbler maneuvering his forces in a grasshopper-field. He throws out
his company of two dozen turkeys in a crescent-shaped skirmish-line, the
number disposed at equal distances, while he walks majestically in
the rear. They advance rapidly, picking right and left, with military
precision, killing the foe and disposing of the dead bodies with the
same peck. Nobody has yet discovered how many grasshoppers a turkey will
hold; but he is very much like a boy at a Thanksgiving dinner,--he keeps
on eating as long as the supplies last. The gobbler, in one of these
raids, does not condescend to grab a single grasshopper,--at least, not
while anybody is watching him. But I suppose he makes up for it when his
dignity cannot be injured by having spectators of his voracity; perhaps
he falls upon the grasshoppers when they are driven into a corner of the
field. But he is only fattening himself for destruction; like all
greedy persons, he comes to a bad end. And if the turkeys had any
Sunday-school, they would be taught this.
The New England boy used to look forward to Thanksgiving as the great
event of the year. He was apt to get stents set him,--so much corn to
husk, for instance, before that day, so that he could have an extra
play-spell; and in order to gain a day or two, he would work at his
task with the rapidity of half a dozen boys. He always had the day
after Thanksgiving as a holiday, and this was the day he counted on.
Thanksgiving itself was rather an awful festival,--very much like
Sunday, except for the enormous dinner, which filled his imagination
for months before as completely as it did his stomach for that day and
a week after. There was an impression in the house that that dinner
was the most important event since the landing from the Mayflower.
Heliogabalus, who did not resemble a Pilgrim Father at all, but who had
prepared for himself in his day some very sumptuous banquets in Rome,
and ate a great deal of the best he could get (and liked peacocks
stuffed with asafetida, for one thing), never had anything like a
Thanksgiving dinner; for do you suppose that he, or Sardanapalus either,
ever had twenty-four different kinds of pie at one dinner? Therein many
a New England boy is greater than the Roman emperor or the Assyrian
king, and these were among the most luxurious eaters of their day and
generation. But something more is necessary to make good men than
plenty to eat, as Heliogabalus no doubt found when his head was cut off.
Cutting off the head was a mode the people had of expressing disapproval
of their conspicuous men. Nowadays they elect them to a higher office,
or give them a mission to some foreign country, if they do not do well
where they are.
For days and days before Thanksgiving the boy was kept at work evenings,
pounding and paring and cutting up and mixing (not being allowed to
taste much), until the world seemed to him to be made of fragrant
spices, green fruit, raisins, and pastry,--a world that he was only yet
allowed to enjoy through his nose. How filled the house was with the
most delicious smells! The mince-pies that were made! If John had been
shut in solid walls with them piled about him, he couldn't have eaten
his way out in four weeks. There were dainties enough cooked in those
two weeks to have made the entire year luscious with good living, if
they had been scattered along in it. But people were probably all the
better for scrimping themselves a little in order to make this a great
feast. And it was not by any means over in a day. There were weeks deep
of chicken-pie and other pastry. The cold buttery was a cave of Aladdin,
and it took a long time to excavate all its riches.
Thanksgiving Day itself was a heavy day, the hilarity of it being so
subdued by going to meeting, and the universal wearing of the
Sunday clothes, that the boy couldn't see it. But if he felt little
exhilaration, he ate a great deal. The next day was the real holiday.
Then were the merry-making parties, and perhaps the skatings and
sleigh-rides, for the freezing weather came before the governor's
proclamation in many parts of New England. The night after Thanksgiving
occurred, perhaps, the first real party that the boy had ever attended,
with live girls in it, dressed so bewitchingly. And there he heard those
philandering songs, and played those sweet games of forfeits, which put
him quite beside himself, and kept him awake that night till the rooster
crowed at the end of his first chicken-nap. What a new world did that
party open to him! I think it likely that he saw there, and probably
did not dare say ten words to, some tall, graceful girl, much older than
himself, who seemed to him like a new order of being. He could see her
face just as plainly in the darkness of his chamber. He wondered if she
noticed how awkward he was, and how short his trousers-legs were. He
blushed as he thought of his rather ill-fitting shoes; and determined,
then and there, that he wouldn't be put off with a ribbon any longer,
but would have a young man's necktie. It was somewhat painful, thinking
the party over, but it was delicious, too. He did not think, probably,
that he would die for that tall, handsome girl; he did not put it
exactly in that way. But he rather resolved to live for her, which might
in the end amount to the same thing. At least, he thought that nobody
would live to speak twice disrespectfully of her in his presence.