Читать книгу Friendly Acres - Peter McArthur - Страница 19

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If the chief business of taking a holiday is to get a change of air and a change of surroundings, then why travel? You can get your holiday by changing your time instead of changing your space. Now don't get worried and imagine that I am going to try to work off some Einstein stuff on you. All I want to say is that if you get up at an unusual hour you will find everything so different that it will amount to the same thing as a holiday. The air will be different and your surroundings will be different. Of course this doesn't apply to the amusing people who fool themselves into thinking that to save daylight they must push the clock an hour ahead and then get up with the clock. When they get up at what should be an hour earlier their whole tiresome world gets up with them. But if you happen to be living under the old dispensation—I mean under standard time—you will get a taste of the real holiday spirit if you happen to get up at half-past three or four o'clock one of these fine summer mornings. It is really worth while having a sleepless night so as to be awake and astir at dawn. As no sensible person is about at that hour you have the world to yourself, and even in a populous countryside you get the feeling of the wilderness. At that hour the world seems to have reverted back to Nature. The little breezes that are astir at daybreak are moist and cool and wonderfully refreshing. They are not at all like the hot gusts that blow against you when the sun is up and the day's work has begun. And at dawn the birds seem to realize that the world belongs to them. The robins begin a rhythmic chorus and the others join in as they waken. When the music is in full swing you can hear sparrows, meadow larks, blackbirds, kildeers and bobolinks; but the robins are the choirmasters. If you are thoroughly awake and alert you will realize that you couldn't get a more complete change of air and surroundings even if you travelled hundreds of miles. But when the daylight-savers get up and start the old routine again you will find yourself back in the old workaday world.

On the mornings when one is not getting up at daybreak there are occasional petty annoyances that interfere with one's beauty sleep. For instance, one never knows just what direction the gobbler is going on his morning ramble. If he happens to come by the tent where we are sleeping he will stand a few feet away and gobble fiercely until we are all wide awake and grumbling. Yesterday morning, by way of variety, we had a visit from the Plymouth Rock rooster. He is a weighty bird—took the first prize at the school fair last fall—and when he crows he puts the weight of his body back of it. He throws himself into his crowing and hurls defiance to every rooster for miles around. I hoped he would go away and pursue the late worm, but he kept right on crowing. Yelling at him from the inside of the tent only managed to change him from crowing to a loud, surprised cackle that was even more exasperating and sleep-destroying. As the children say, "It's a great life, if you don't weaken."