Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1883-06-07
Spring Work and Boys.

This is the season of the year when
people begin the grand agricultural la
Dor of agitating the soil of the garden,
and shaping up the onion bed, and CIV
ing it the requisite form and void to re-
ceive the early onion seed, and COM
mencing to gaze fondly into the soft,
dreamy eyes of the seed potatoes to see
if they possess the necessary life to catch
on under the warm rays of the spring
sunshine. The cabbage plants are set
out in the sun or in the dollhouse, and
watched and nursed with as much care
as baby would be, and the small boy
of the household. who sees in the near
future prospects of a seasons work
keeping the weeds out of the cab
bage plants after they are set out, lies
awake nights planning destruction to
the plants, and working up schemes for
getting them frost-bitten and killed be-
fore it is time to set them out. There
is probably no work, unless it be saving
wood, that boy hates to do more than
work in the garden in the spring. 1t is
the season when the boy is let out after
winters confinement, and he is just ach-
ING for fun. and he don't want any work
around the house to bother him. Boys
have been known to lay down a fish-pole
and give up a days fishing for the fun of
raking up the yard, when the prospects
for bonfire in the evening were good,
but when it comes to spading up an old
flower bed, he knows the fish are just
dying to be caught, and it requires a
good deal of diplomacy to keep him at
the spading job an hour at time. And
boy can hardly be blamed for it,
either. In the spring, he wants to get
out and shake himself playing ball, and
no exercise in a garden with a spade will
do any boy on earth that has got any
get up about him. Boys have been
known to lean over on their knees play
ing marbles for hours at time, and I'M
til they had callouses on their knees that
stuck right through their pants. but
boy with callouses on his knees from
leaning over an onion bed in the
garden would lie one of the
curiosities of the age. Nearly all the
great statesmen of the present day can
look back to the time when they d rather
stand in the mud and water up to their
knees and fish for bull-heads than help
plant potatoes in the best garden in the
country. A boy seems to have horror
of working around garden, and we
don't believe there is a man in the coun-
try to-day, who ever was boy, but who
can look back to the time when his fate
for spring day lay between working
in his fathers garden and going fishing
or playing ball, and when he could
by any sharp hoyish craftsmanship
choose the latter, that he did
not sneak over the back fence
with a can of angle-worms under
his coat, and let the garden slide. You
take, for instance, a boy with a lame
back, and almost every boy has lame
back when there is any work to be done
in the garden, and almost any parent
would take pity on him and tell him to
90 in the house and 60 to bed. Itseems
from that moment that the boys back
grows stronger, and in fifteen minutes
he is out of the window, and the neigh
bOrhOOd, oyer with crowd of other
boys, straining his poor little weak
back trying to knock the stuffing out of
a ball with a bat that required more ex-
ert:on to WELD than hoe would. Even
the best kind of boy, who will gladly
work like a major at any other season
of the year, seems to have a fearful
falling out with all manner of labor in
the spring. But somehow the spring |
garden is made each year, and the boy
grows up to manhood, and finally has a
boy of his own. and garden that de-
mands attentions; then it seems that
when he wants his own boy to help in
the garden, and fifteen minutes after he |
sets the boy to work he finds him in
the street playing marbles. he forgets
how it was when he was boy himself,
and he argues with his boy with hoe
handle. Twas ever thus.-Peck's San.