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whetstone.”
    You’d have thought Grandfather’s wrist and elbow were on ball bearings. There wasn’t more than two inches of the whetstone sticking up out of his fist, but he swiped it forward and back along both sides of the scythe edge so fast my eye couldn’t follow his hand, and at every stroke he stoned the blade from heel to point. After about a minute, he ran his thumbnail the length of the blade, and said, “There! There, by gorry, Ralphie! Now we’ll see what kind of logs makes wide shingles!”
    Grandfather slipped the broken stone into his pocket, grasped the hand grips on the snath, and had the scythe swinging as he brought it down. Little as he was, he kept in perfect balance as he swung the long blade, and he made it whistle each time it swept forward through the grass. Closely as I watched him, I never saw a jerk or pull anywhere. The ground was littered with stones—some of them as big as my head—and the scythe rode over every one without touching it. When he’d gone eight or ten feet, he stopped and held the scythe out toward me. “There you be, Ralphie,” he said. “Ain’t nothing to it ’cepting to watch out for rocks. Tarnal hard to see some of ’em where the grass is rank. Now let your old grampa see you swing it.”
    I did a little better after that, but not very well. For the next half hour, Grandfather alternated between scolding me for being awkward and telling me I was beginning to get the hang of it. Then he went back to the mowing machine. It was out of my sight when I heard Grandfather shouting, and thought he must be in bad trouble. I went running over there as fast as I could and, when I got to where I could see them, he was pulling at the buckskin’s bridle and shouting into his face, “Gitap! Gitap, you fool colt! What ails you? Gitap, I tell you!”
    Grandfather dropped the bridle rein when I came running up, and said, “Might just as leave unhitch him. Tarnal stubborn critter! Ain’t ary man this side the Androscoggin River can make him pull once he gets his head sot on balking.”
    One of the men I’d worked for in Colorado was an expert with balky horses. I didn’t know all the tricks, but I’d learned enough of them that I never had much trouble with his horses, and I was sure I wouldn’t have any with the yella colt. “Let me try him,” I said to Grandfather, and reached for a piece of thin wire that was twisted around one of the old horse’s traces.
    “Stand back! Stand back!” Grandfather snapped at me. “For aught I know he’ll commence having one of his cat fits any minute now.”
    As if the yella colt had understood him, he began shaking his head and slatting around. “Whoa, colty! Whoa! Whoa!” Grandfather shouted as if the horse had been a mile away. “Unhitch Old Nell quick, Ralphie, whilst I loose the colt. Look lively afore he staves the whole shootingmatch to smithereens! Ain’t nothing to do now but fetch him back to the barn.”
    That was the end of our haying for the day. As soon as the horses were unharnessed and in their stalls, Grandfather set me to sawing firewood with a bucksaw, and went down to do something around the beehives.
    I didn’t see a thing of Millie all afternoon, but my dirty clothes had been washed and were hanging on the clothesline. It was nearly sunset, and I was as hungry as a coyote when Grandfather called, “Leave be, Ralphie! I and you’ll go fetch the cows.” He came climbing up over the yard wall, looked at the pile of wood I’d sawed, and said, “Gorry sake! Ain’t half bad for a boy that don’t know no more’n you do about farming, Ralphie. Cal’late your old grampa can make a man out of you yet. Did Charlie learn you to handle a bucksaw?”
    “Yes, sir,” I said. “Father taught me to do quite a few things, and I’ve learned a little bit from other men, too.”
    “Poor boy! Poor boy! Shame they didn’t learn you nothing worth while, ’cepting to saw wood. Oh, well, what’s the odds?