When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of them grew.

But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length.[Pg 32] Neither could the cornfield beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.

I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We had then begun to build our new house. The frame had been raised, as the custom of that country still was, in a frolic of the neighbors, to whom unlimited coffee and a boiled ham had been served in requital of their civility, and now we were kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. To do this we had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire.

This fire had to be watched night and day, and it never took less than three or four boys, and often all the boys of the neighborhood, to watch it, and to turn and change the boards. The summer of[Pg 33] Southern Ohio is surely no joke, and it must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, whose ears we spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same time.

But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing, reduced almost to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. In those days one went in swimming (we did not say bathing) four or five times a day with advantage and refreshment; anything more than that was, perhaps, thought unwholesome.

We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.

We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-s............