The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting
observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and
the tedious people. He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.
He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of
abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither
in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his
little gains. On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maize
and grapes are carried in the _botte_, so usually are children expected
in the field that _bottes_ are made to the shape of a back and arms of
five years old. Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no
more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans. You may
meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of
times in the morning. Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense
of what is due to that labourer. When the plums are gathered, for
instance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tarts
across which her arm can hardly reach. No plum tarts elsewhere are
anything but dull in comparison with these. There is, besides, the first
loaf from the new flour, brown from the maize and white from the wheat.
Nor can a day of potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a
little fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the
wood ashes.
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