After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us.
Our faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and
our shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked
as if they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe,
the scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at
daybreak with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was
usually quite gone by breakfast-time.
To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They
told slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or
to drive them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from
their conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too,
that the cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and
invariably kicked over the pails; partly in consequence of our
putting the stool on the wrong side, and partly because, taking
offence at the whisking of their tails, we were in the habit of
holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand and milking with the
other. They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian
corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds;
and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for
cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful planting few of our seeds
ever came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost;
and that we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a
field of beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this
unseemly way.
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