Chapter 43

HIDING EGGS FOR EASTER.

Those who were so unfortunate as to have been born and brought up in the city know nothing about that chapter in a boy's history of which I speak.

About a month before Easter there comes to the farmhouse a scarcity of eggs. The farmer's wife begins to abuse the weasels and the cats as the probable cause of the paucity. The feline tribe are assaulted with many a harsh "Scat!" on the suspicion of their fondness for omelets in the raw. Custards fail from the table. The Dominick hens are denounced as not worth their mush. Meanwhile, the boys stand round the corner in a broad grin at what is the discomfiture of the rest of the family.

The truth must be told that the boys, in anticipation of Easter, have, in some hole in the mow or some barrel in the wagon-house, been hiding eggs. If the youngsters understand their business, they will compromise the matter, and see that at least a small supply goes to the house every day. Too great greed on the part of the boy will discover the whole plot, and the charge will be made: "De Witt, I believe you are hiding the eggs!" Forthwith the boy is collared and compelled to disgorge his possessions.

Now, there is nothing more trying to a boy than, after great care in accumulating these shelly resources, to have to place them in a basket and bring them forth to the light two weeks before Easter. Boys, therefore, manage with skill and dexterity. At this season of the year you see them lurking much about the hayrick and the hay-loft. You see them crawling out from stacks of straw and walking away rapidly with their hands behind them. They look very innocent, for I have noticed that the look of innocence in boys is proportioned to the amount of mischief with which they are stuffed. They seem to be determined to risk their lives on mow-poles where the hay lies thin. They come out from under the stable floor in a despicable state of toilet, and cannot give any excuse for their depreciation of apparel. Hens flutter off the nest with an unusual squawk, for the boys cannot wait any longer for the slow process of laying, and hens have no business to stand in the way of Easter. The most tedious hours of my boyhood were spent in waiting for a hen to get off her nest. No use to scare her off, for then she will get mad, and just as like as not take the egg with her. Indeed, I think the boy is excusable for his haste if his brother has a dozen eggs and he has only eleven.

At this season of the year the hens are melancholy. They want to hatch, but how can they? They have the requisite disposition, and the capacity, and the feathers, and the nest, and everything but the eggs. With that deficit, they sometimes sit obstinately and defy the boy's approaches. Many a boy has felt the sharp bill of old Dominick strike the back of his hand, inflicting a wound that would have roused up the whole farmhouse to see what was the matter had it not been that the boy wanted to excite no suspicion as to the nature of his expedition. Immediately over the hen's head comes the boy's cap, and there is a scatteration of feathers all over the hay-mow, and the boy is victor.

But at last the evening before Easter comes. While the old people are on the piazza the children come in with the accumulated treasures of many weeks, and put down the baskets. Eggs large and small, white-shelled and brown, Cochin-Chinas and Brahmapooters. The character of the hens is vindicated. The cat may now lie in the sun without being kicked by false suspicions. The surprised exclamation of parents more than compensates the boys for the strategy of long concealment. The meanest thing in the world is for father and mother not to look surprised in such circumstances.

It sometimes happens that, in the agitation of bringing the eggs into the household harbor, the boy drops the hat or the basket, and the whole enterprise is shipwrecked. From our own experience, it is very difficult to pick up eggs after you have once dropped them. You have found the same experience in after life. Your hens laid a whole nestful of golden eggs on Wall street. You had gathered them up. You were bringing them in. You expected a world of congratulations, but just the day before the consummation, something adverse ran against you, and you dropped the basket, and the eggs broke. Wise man were you if, instead of sitting down to cry or attempting to gather up the spilled yolks, you built new nests and invited a new laying.

It is sometimes found on Easter morning that the eggs have been kept too long. The boy's intentions were good enough, but the enterprise had been too protracted, and the casting out of the dozen was sudden and precipitate. Indeed, that is the trouble with some older boys I wot of. They keep their money, or their brain, or their influence hidden till it rots. They are not willing to come forth day by day on a humble mission, doing what little good they may, but are keeping themselves hidden till some great Easter-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties ruined. Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a poor man's table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of Lords.

That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled, eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter morning in boyhood.

Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them on stilts, and they buy their eggs out of the store. There is no room for a boy to swing round. There is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle a hoop, or even shout without people's throwing up the window to see who is killed. The holidays are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre will persist in telling him who Santa Claus is, while yet he is hanging up his first pair of stockings. Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing but the trouble of breathing it, he may smell a country full of new-mown hay and wild honeysuckle. In a painted bath-tub he takes his Saturday bath careful lest he hit his head against the spigot, while in the meadow-brook the boys plunge in wild glee, and pluck up health and long life from the pebbly bottom. Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing of mother to let you take off your shoes, you dash out on the cool grass barefoot, or down the road, the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment, and, henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes to tie or blacken.

Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other family ever had such grandchildren. It will be a good thing when the evenings are short, and the old folks' eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up in their house for a little while one or two of these lights of childhood. For the time the aches and pains of old age will be gone, and they will feel as lithe and merry as when sixty years ago they themselves rummaged hayrick, and mow and wagon-house, hiding eggs for Easter.