Читать книгу Looking Back: An Autobiography - Merrick Abner Richardson - Страница 32

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Oh, those golden days when with indulgent parents we gathered around the table of plenty. There we romped in the orchards, woods and meadows, among the wild flowers and through the shady dells, where we chased the rabbits and squirrels, hunting the shy nests of birds, watching the pretty fish in the crystal stream, as they darted about showing their silver sides. The side hills teemed with wild fruit, shadberries, checkerberries, cherries, grapes, strawberries, etc. Wild birds were in abundance and their songs were gay; I think I hear them now. Father taught us that we must not destroy the nests of crows, hawks or other bad birds, not even the homes of the mischievous woodchucks, who nibbled our pumpkins. He said, "Let them bring up their little families. God provides room and food for all."

When we brought the little blue eggs in for mother to see, she would kiss and hurry us back with them to the nest, for she said the mother bird's heart would ache if we broke one of her little eggs.

And yet, after all, my brother, Gordon, and myself were not real neighborhood pets, for the two little sun-burned blondes were not as innocent as they looked. Aunt Becky Bragg, our second-door neighbor, was quoted as saying that Warren Richardson's two little whiteheaded urchins were the bane of her life, and all attempts to chide them seemed only to add fuel to the flames.

We must have been useful about the farm, in teaching the chickens and cats to swim and the colts and steers to let us ride them, who occasionally dumped us where we least expected. One lively pastime was to tie a tin pan to one of the sleepy old cattle's tail, and watch him bound over the bushes to clear himself from what seemed to be following him. I can now see these great gentle creatures with half-closed eyes chewing their cuds, while father was around them, but when we appeared, they would stop chewing, bulge out their eyes and make ready to jump over the wall at our first gesture.

Still we had our confiding pets, hens, lambs and even pigs. We had a curly-haired pig which would follow us around and lie down for us to scratch him, and as for dogs—why, old Major, the neighborhood tramp of suspicious character, stood in well with us and licked our hands and faces as we fed and gave him a warm shelter from the cold night.

Father and mother understood it all, I know they did, but they realized how we would soon be out in the hand-to-hand conflict of life, and they wanted us to look back to our childhood mountain home with gladness and not pain.

I was exceedingly stubborn and moderately truthful, so much so that one of the first remembrances of my life was that in some mysterious way I had acquired the nickname of Old Honesty. Oh, it did make me so mad to be called that, for I must have considered it a sort of defamation of character.