Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[198] farmer has laboriously mowed down a too exuberant crop of white-weed, it is asking a good deal of his wife when she is called upon to supply her best pitcher for a bouquet of it under the name of oxeye daisy. But with a farmer of untiring benignity, wedded to a spouse of inexhaustible patience, what place is so blissful or healthful to children as a farm?

It gives a sphere so unbounded for that delicious and laborious idleness which children call pleasure, there is so much to do and there are such long summer days to do it in, that one pities at this season even the most petted children who are anywhere else. Fancy them driving about, exquisitely dressed, with mamma in her basket-wagon at Newport, when they might be riding home on the loaded hay-cart, or assisting to harness old Dobbin for a drive into some secluded wood-road, scented with sweet-ferns and haunted by the wood-thrush! Or the children on the farm, grown bolder, stand by the farmer's side as he drives over the dry and slippery grass upon his stone-drag — a sort of summer toboggan, with nothing but a board between the rider and the uneven surface of Mother Earth. Arrived at the spring, perhaps, the child sees the farmer slowly fill the cask with water, and then drive the drag to the farther field, the child now walking by his side, expectant of the return trip. Then there are the eggs to be looked for; not, indeed, as formerly, in the