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get along much better mending harness than we had in breaking it. Father had taught me how to set a rivet tight by driving the washer down with a small nut, then cutting the tail close and tapping it evenly with a hammer. The only rivets we could find on the bench were three-quarters of an inch long, and the washers were too big to fit them. I tried to show Grandfather how to split a rivet end, spread it both ways and tap it flat, but he snatched the hammer out of my hands. “Great thunderation!” he snapped. “You’re worse than Levi! Fiddle-faddle ’round half a day putting in a harness rivet! Stand back whilst I fetch it a clip!” He swung the hammer higher than his head, pounded it down like a sledge, and mashed the long rivet into a flat figure S. “There, by thunder!” he said, as he looked at it. “Ain’t no reason that won’t hold tight as a button. Now find me three, four, half a dozen more of ’em. Your old grampa’ll learn you how to be a farmer yet, Ralphie.”

5
    Snath and Scythe
    I COULD hardly wait to get into the field so I could show Grandfather that I really knew something about haying. It worked just exactly backwards. Instead of letting me run the mowing machine, he told me to take the snath and scythe and cut hay out from under the apple trees. I might just as well have been trying to cut it with a broom as with a scythe. On the first swing, I ran the edge of the blade along a hidden rock, and then it wouldn’t cut worth a cent.
    To see Father swinging a scythe, it had looked to be the easiest thing in the world to do. The scythe went back and forth like a clock pendulum, and left stubble two or three inches high. For me, it was like trying to swing a dog by his tail. The crooked handle wobbled around in my hands, and the blade either stuck in the ground or just tore the heads off the hay. The stubble looked the same way my brother Philip’s hair did the first time I tried to cut it.
    We started in the corner of the orchard, near the gap in the stonewall. As soon as Grandfather had told me what to do, he let the cutter bar on the mowing machine down and hollered, “Gitap! Gitap!” to the horses. The yella colt started off on his hind legs, the gears screeched, and the sickle pounded back and forth in the cutter bar like a broken piston on a steam engine. I watched them make the first fifty yards before I tried the scythe. The three broken knife sections on the machine didn’t cut at all; just tore the grass and left it lying in snaky lines on the ground. The yella colt was still jumping like a rabbit when they went out of sight behind a tree, and every time he jumped they left a patch of dragged-down hay. Above the racket of the machine, Grandfather was shouting, “Tarnal fool colt! Settle down! Settle down, I tell you!”
    The orchard wasn’t more than ten acres, but it was half an hour before Grandfather got around it the first time. He stopped the mowing machine just beyond the tree I was trying to mow under, and hollered, “What in the name of creation be you trying to do?”
    “I never tried to use one of these things before,” I told him, “and I haven’t got the hang of it yet.”
    “Gorry sakes alive!” he said, as he came toward me. “You might have et it off evener with your teeth. Why, you ain’t got the amount of sense the Almighty give to hens.”
    I was mad enough at myself for not being able to make the scythe do what I wanted it to, and when Grandfather said that, I couldn’t help boiling over. “It looks just about as bad as the swath you’ve cut, doesn’t it?” I shouted back. “Only you had a machine to do it for you.” Then I hooked the scythe on a limb and started to walk away.
    Grandfather’s voice dropped right down. “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie,” he said. “’Tain’t no fault of your’n, I don’t cal’late, that you ain’t been learned nothing. Here, let your old grampa show you how to swing a snath and scythe. Pass me the