Free Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

whitewash. Then they whitewashed the whole cellar. That was fun.
    “Mercy on us!” Mother said when they came upstairs. “Did you get as much whitewash on the cellar as you got on yourselves?”
    The whole cellar was fresh and clean and snow-white when it dried. Mother moved her milk-pans down to the scrubbed shelves. T h e butter-tubs were scoured white with sand and dried in the sun, and Almanzo set them in a row on the clean cellar floor, to be filled with the summer's butter.
    Outdoors the lilacs and the snowball bushes were in bloom. Violets and buttercups were blossoming in the green pastures, birds were building their nests, and it was time to work in the fields.

SPRINGTIME
    Now breakfast was eaten before dawn, and the sun was rising beyond the dewy meadows when Almanzo drove his team from the barns.
    He had to stand on a box to lift the heavy collars onto the horses' shoulders and to slip the bridles over their ears, but he knew how to drive. He had learned when he was little. Father wouldn't let him touch the colts, nor drive the spirited young horses, but now that he was old enough to work in the fields he could drive the old, gentle work-team, Bess and Beauty.
    They were wise, sober mares. When they were turned out to pasture they did not whinny and gallop like colts; they looked about them, lay down and rolled once or twice, and then fell to eating grass. When they were harnessed, they stepped sedately one behind the other over the sill of the barn door, sniffed the spring air, and waited patiently for the traces to be fastened.
    They were older than Almanzo, and he was going on ten.
    They knew how to plow without stepping on corn, or making the furrows crooked. They knew how to harrow, and to turn at the end of the field.
    Almanzo would have enjoyed driving them more if they hadn't known so much.
    He hitched them to the harrow. Last fall the fields had been plowed and covered with manure; now the lumpy soil must be harrowed.
    Bess and Beauty stepped out willingly, not too fast, yet fast enough to harrow well. They liked to work in the springtime, after the long winter of standing in their stalls. Back and forth across the field they pulled the harrow, while Almanzo walked behind it, holding the reins. At the end of the row he turned the team around and set the harrow so that its teeth barely overlapped the strip already harrowed. Then he slapped the reins on the horses' rumps, shouted, “Giddap!” and away they went again.
    All over the countryside other boys were harrowing, too, turning up the moist earth to the sunshine. Far to the north the St. Lawrence River was a silver streak at the edge of the sky. The woods were clouds of delicate green. Birds hopped twittering on the stone fences, and squirrels frisked. Almanzo walked whistling behind his team.
    When he harrowed the whole field across one way, then he harrowed it across the other way.
    The harrow's sharp teeth combed again and again through the earth, breaking up the lumps. All the soil must be made mellow and fine and smooth.
    By and by Almanzo was too hungry to whistle.
    He grew hungrier and hungrier. It seemed that noon would never come. He wondered how many miles he'd walked. And still the sun seemed to stand still, the shadows seemed not to change at all. He was starving.
    At last the sun stood overhead, the shadows were quite gone. Almanzo harrowed another row, and another. Then at last he heard the horns blowing, far and near.
    Clear and joyful came the sound of Mother's big tin dinner-horn.
    Bess and Beauty pricked up their ears and stepped more briskly. At the edge of the field toward the house they stopped. Almanzo unfastened the traces and looped them up, and leaving the harrow in the field, he climbed onto Beauty's broad back.
    He rode down to the pumphouse and let the horses drink. He put them in their stall, took off their bridles, and gave them their grain. A good horseman always takes care of his horses before he eats or rests. But