July 17, 2025 • 11 mins
Dive into Warners engaging and humor-filled memoir as he shares his experiences growing up on a farm in Charlemont, Massachusetts. Narrated by Mark Penfold, this podcast will transport you back to a simpler time and place.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter fifteen of Being a Boy by Charles Dudley Warner.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Mark Penfold, Chapter fifteen, The Heart of New England. It
is a wonder that every New England boy does not
(00:21):
turn out a poet, or a missionary or a peddler.
Most of them used to. There is everything in the
heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination
of the boy and excite his longing for strange countries.
I scarcely know what the subtle influence is that forms
him and attracts him in the most fascinating and aromatic
of all lands, and yet urges him away from all
(00:41):
the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer
in literature and in the world, a poet and a wanderer.
There is something in the soil and the pure air,
I suspect that promises more romance than is forthcoming, that
excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the desire
of adventure. The prosaic life of the sweet home does
(01:02):
not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the
world in the good old days. I am told the
boys on the coast ran away and became sailors. The
country boys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries,
and then they sailed away and met the coast boys
in foreign ports. John used to spend hours in the
top of a slender hickory tree that a little detached
(01:22):
itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the
steep and lofty pasture behind his home. He was sent
to make war on the bushes that constantly encroached upon
the pasture land. But John had no hostility to any
growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied him. When
he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree sprouts,
he was wont to retire into his favorite post of
(01:44):
observation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied that the wide, swaying
stem to which he clung was the mast of a ship,
that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves
of the sea, and that the wind, which moaned over
the woods and murmured in the leaves and now and
then sent him a wide circuit in the air, as
if he had been a blackbird on the tip top
of a spruce, was an ocean. Gale. What life and
(02:06):
action in heroism there was to him in the multitudinous
roar of the forest, And what an eternity of existence
in the monolog of the river which brawled far far
below him over its wide stony bed. How the river
sparkled and danced and went on now in a smooth
amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with
that continuous, busy song. John never knew that noise to cease,
(02:30):
and he doubted not if he stayed here a thousand years,
that same loud murmur would fill the air on it
went under the wide spans of the old wooden covered bridge,
swirling around the great rocks on which the piers stood,
spreading away below in shallows, and taking the shadows of
a row of maples that lined the green shore. Save
(02:50):
this roar, no sound reached him, except now and then
the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the
muffled far off voices of some chance passers on the road.
Seen from this high perch, the familiar village, sending its
brown roofs and white spires up through the green foliage,
had a strange aspect, and was like some town in
a book say, a village nestled in the Swiss mountains,
(03:12):
or something in Bohemia. And there beyond the purple hills
of Bozrah, and not so far as the stony pastures
of Zoah, whither John had helped drive the colts and
young stock in the spring, might be perhaps Jerusalem itself.
John had himself once been to the land of Canaan
with his grandfather when he was a very small boy,
and he had once seen an actual no mistake, Jew,
(03:35):
a mysterious person with uncut beard and long hair, who
sold scythe snaths in that region, and about whom there
was a rumor that he was once caught and shaved
by the indignant farmers, who apprehended in his long locks
a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh, the world had
vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a
vast basin of forest, there was a notch in the
(03:57):
horizon and an opening in the line of woods where
the road ran. Through this opening, John imagined an army
might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red
and of yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about and
point its long nose, and open on the valley. He
fancied the army after this salute, winding down the mountain road,
(04:18):
deploying in the meadows, and giving the valley to pillage
and to flame, in which event his position would be
an excellent one for observation and for safety. While he
was in the height of this engagement, perhaps the horn
would be blown from the back porch, reminding him that
it was time to quit cutting brush and go for
the cows. As if there were no better use for
a warrior and a poet in New England than to
(04:40):
send him for the cows. John knew a boy, a
bad enough boy, I dare say, who afterwards became a
general in the war, and went to Congress and got
to be a real governor, who also used to be
sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and hated
it in his very soul, and by his wrong conduct,
forecast what kind of a man he would be. This boy,
(05:00):
as soon as he had cut about one brush, would
seek for one of several holes in the ground, and
he was familiar with several in which lived a white
and black animal that must always be nameless in a book,
but an animal quite capable of the most pungent defense
of himself. This young aspirant to congress, would cut a
long stick with a little crotch in the end of
it and run it into the hole. And when the
(05:22):
crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal,
he would twist the stick round till it got a
good grip on the skin, and then he would pull
the beast out. And when he got the white and
black just out of the hole so that his dog
could seize him, the boy would take to his heels
and leave the two to fight it out, content to
scent the battle afar off. And this boy, who was
in training for public life, would do this sort of
(05:44):
thing all the afternoon, and when the sun told him
that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he
would industriously go home, as innocent as anybody. There are
few such boys as this nowadays, and that is the
reason why the New England pastures are so much overgrown
with brush. John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck.
He bore a special grudge against this clover eater, beyond
(06:07):
the usual hostility that boys feel for any wild animal.
One day, on his way to school, a woodchuck crossed
the road before him, and John gave chase. The woodchuck
scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple tree.
John thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and
stood under the tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon,
the woodchuck dropped down on John and seized him by
(06:28):
the leg of his trousers. John was both enraged and
scared by this dastardly attack. The teeth of the enemy
went through the cloth and met, and there he hung.
John then made a pivot of one leg and whirled
himself around, swinging the woodchuck in the air until he
shook him off. But in his departure the woodchuck carried
away a large piece of John's summer trouser's leg. The
(06:49):
boy never forgot it, and whenever he had a holiday,
he used to expend an amount of labor and ingenuity
in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have made his
fortune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill pasture
down on one side of which ran a small brook,
and this pasture was full of woodchuck holes. It required
the assistance of several boys to capture woodchuck. It was
(07:10):
first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that the woodchuck
was at home when one was seen to enter his burrow.
Then all the entries to it except one there are
usually three were plugged up with stones. A boy and
a dog were then left to watch the open hole
while John and his comrades went to the brook and
began to dig a canal to turn the water into
(07:31):
the residence of the woodchuck. This was often a difficult
feat of engineering and a long job. Often it took
more than half a day of hard labor with shovel
and hoe to dig the canal. But when the canal
was finished and the water began to pour into the hole,
the excitement began. How long would it take to fill
the hole and drown out the woodchuck. Sometimes it seemed
(07:52):
as if the hole was a bottomless pit, But sooner
or later the water would rise in it, and then
there was sure to be seen the nose of the
woodchuck keeping its son off on a level with the
rising flood. It was piteous to see the anxious look
of the hunted, half drowned creature as it came to
the surface and caught sight of the dog. There the
dog stood at the mouth of the hole, quivering with
(08:13):
excitement from his nose to the tip of his tail,
and behind him were the cruel boys, dancing with joy
and setting the dog on. The poor creature would disappear
in the water in terror, but he must breathe, and
out would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time.
At last the water ran out of the hole as
well as in, and the soaked beast came with it
(08:33):
and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the
dog had him, and the boys stood off in a
circle with stones in their hands to see what they
called fair play. They maintained perfect neutrality so long as
the dog was getting the best of the woodchuck, But
if the latter was likely to escape, they interfered in
the interest of peace and the balance of power, and
(08:56):
killed the woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice.
Of course, he'd no business to be a woodchuck, an
unspeakable woodchuck. I used the word aromatic in relation to
the New England soil. John knew very well all its sweet, aromatic,
pungent and medicinal products, and liked to search for the
scented herbs and the wild fruits and exquisite flowers. But
(09:19):
he did not then know, and few do know, that
there is no part of the globe where the subtile
chemistry of the earth produces more that is agreeable to
the senses than a new England hill pasture and the
green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded in
turning our attention from it to the comparatively barren orient
as the land of sweet smelling spices and odorous gums.
(09:40):
And it is indeed a constant surprise that this poor
and stony soil elaborates and grows so many delicate and
aromatic products. John, it is true, did not care much
for anything that did not appeal to his taste and
smell and delight in brilliant color. And he trod down
the exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses without compunction. But
(10:00):
he gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine
and the egglantine, and the blue hairbell. He picked the
high flavored alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants,
and gooseberries, and fox grapes. He brought some armfuls of
the pink and white laurel and the wild honeysuckle. He
dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of the
(10:20):
sweet flag. He ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen
and its red berries. He gathered the peppermint and the spearmint.
He gnawed the twigs of the black birch. There was
a stout fern which he called brake, which he pulled
up and found that the soft end tasted good. He
dug the amber gum from the spruce tree, and liked
to smell, though he could not chew the gum of
(10:41):
the wild cherry. It was his melancholy duty to bring
home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold thread,
the tansy, and the loathsome bone set, and he laid
in for the winter like a squirrel, stores of beech nuts,
hazel nuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which
lives most vividly in his memory, and most strongly draws
(11:02):
him back to the New England hills is the aromatic
sweet fern. He likes to eat, its spicy seeds and
a crush in his hands its fragrant leaves. Their odor
is the unique essence of New England. End of Chapter fifteen.
Recording by Mark Penfold,
Chapter fifteen of Being a Boy by Charles Dudley Warner.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Mark Penfold, Chapter fifteen, The Heart of New England. It
is a wonder that every New England boy does not
(00:21):
turn out a poet, or a missionary or a peddler.
Most of them used to. There is everything in the
heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination
of the boy and excite his longing for strange countries.
I scarcely know what the subtle influence is that forms
him and attracts him in the most fascinating and aromatic
of all lands, and yet urges him away from all
(00:41):
the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer
in literature and in the world, a poet and a wanderer.
There is something in the soil and the pure air,
I suspect that promises more romance than is forthcoming, that
excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the desire
of adventure. The prosaic life of the sweet home does
(01:02):
not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the
world in the good old days. I am told the
boys on the coast ran away and became sailors. The
country boys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries,
and then they sailed away and met the coast boys
in foreign ports. John used to spend hours in the
top of a slender hickory tree that a little detached
(01:22):
itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the
steep and lofty pasture behind his home. He was sent
to make war on the bushes that constantly encroached upon
the pasture land. But John had no hostility to any
growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied him. When
he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree sprouts,
he was wont to retire into his favorite post of
(01:44):
observation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied that the wide, swaying
stem to which he clung was the mast of a ship,
that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves
of the sea, and that the wind, which moaned over
the woods and murmured in the leaves and now and
then sent him a wide circuit in the air, as
if he had been a blackbird on the tip top
of a spruce, was an ocean. Gale. What life and
(02:06):
action in heroism there was to him in the multitudinous
roar of the forest, And what an eternity of existence
in the monolog of the river which brawled far far
below him over its wide stony bed. How the river
sparkled and danced and went on now in a smooth
amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with
that continuous, busy song. John never knew that noise to cease,
(02:30):
and he doubted not if he stayed here a thousand years,
that same loud murmur would fill the air on it
went under the wide spans of the old wooden covered bridge,
swirling around the great rocks on which the piers stood,
spreading away below in shallows, and taking the shadows of
a row of maples that lined the green shore. Save
(02:50):
this roar, no sound reached him, except now and then
the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the
muffled far off voices of some chance passers on the road.
Seen from this high perch, the familiar village, sending its
brown roofs and white spires up through the green foliage,
had a strange aspect, and was like some town in
a book say, a village nestled in the Swiss mountains,
(03:12):
or something in Bohemia. And there beyond the purple hills
of Bozrah, and not so far as the stony pastures
of Zoah, whither John had helped drive the colts and
young stock in the spring, might be perhaps Jerusalem itself.
John had himself once been to the land of Canaan
with his grandfather when he was a very small boy,
and he had once seen an actual no mistake, Jew,
(03:35):
a mysterious person with uncut beard and long hair, who
sold scythe snaths in that region, and about whom there
was a rumor that he was once caught and shaved
by the indignant farmers, who apprehended in his long locks
a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh, the world had
vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a
vast basin of forest, there was a notch in the
(03:57):
horizon and an opening in the line of woods where
the road ran. Through this opening, John imagined an army
might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red
and of yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about and
point its long nose, and open on the valley. He
fancied the army after this salute, winding down the mountain road,
(04:18):
deploying in the meadows, and giving the valley to pillage
and to flame, in which event his position would be
an excellent one for observation and for safety. While he
was in the height of this engagement, perhaps the horn
would be blown from the back porch, reminding him that
it was time to quit cutting brush and go for
the cows. As if there were no better use for
a warrior and a poet in New England than to
(04:40):
send him for the cows. John knew a boy, a
bad enough boy, I dare say, who afterwards became a
general in the war, and went to Congress and got
to be a real governor, who also used to be
sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and hated
it in his very soul, and by his wrong conduct,
forecast what kind of a man he would be. This boy,
(05:00):
as soon as he had cut about one brush, would
seek for one of several holes in the ground, and
he was familiar with several in which lived a white
and black animal that must always be nameless in a book,
but an animal quite capable of the most pungent defense
of himself. This young aspirant to congress, would cut a
long stick with a little crotch in the end of
it and run it into the hole. And when the
(05:22):
crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal,
he would twist the stick round till it got a
good grip on the skin, and then he would pull
the beast out. And when he got the white and
black just out of the hole so that his dog
could seize him, the boy would take to his heels
and leave the two to fight it out, content to
scent the battle afar off. And this boy, who was
in training for public life, would do this sort of
(05:44):
thing all the afternoon, and when the sun told him
that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he
would industriously go home, as innocent as anybody. There are
few such boys as this nowadays, and that is the
reason why the New England pastures are so much overgrown
with brush. John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck.
He bore a special grudge against this clover eater, beyond
(06:07):
the usual hostility that boys feel for any wild animal.
One day, on his way to school, a woodchuck crossed
the road before him, and John gave chase. The woodchuck
scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple tree.
John thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and
stood under the tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon,
the woodchuck dropped down on John and seized him by
(06:28):
the leg of his trousers. John was both enraged and
scared by this dastardly attack. The teeth of the enemy
went through the cloth and met, and there he hung.
John then made a pivot of one leg and whirled
himself around, swinging the woodchuck in the air until he
shook him off. But in his departure the woodchuck carried
away a large piece of John's summer trouser's leg. The
(06:49):
boy never forgot it, and whenever he had a holiday,
he used to expend an amount of labor and ingenuity
in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have made his
fortune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill pasture
down on one side of which ran a small brook,
and this pasture was full of woodchuck holes. It required
the assistance of several boys to capture woodchuck. It was
(07:10):
first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that the woodchuck
was at home when one was seen to enter his burrow.
Then all the entries to it except one there are
usually three were plugged up with stones. A boy and
a dog were then left to watch the open hole
while John and his comrades went to the brook and
began to dig a canal to turn the water into
(07:31):
the residence of the woodchuck. This was often a difficult
feat of engineering and a long job. Often it took
more than half a day of hard labor with shovel
and hoe to dig the canal. But when the canal
was finished and the water began to pour into the hole,
the excitement began. How long would it take to fill
the hole and drown out the woodchuck. Sometimes it seemed
(07:52):
as if the hole was a bottomless pit, But sooner
or later the water would rise in it, and then
there was sure to be seen the nose of the
woodchuck keeping its son off on a level with the
rising flood. It was piteous to see the anxious look
of the hunted, half drowned creature as it came to
the surface and caught sight of the dog. There the
dog stood at the mouth of the hole, quivering with
(08:13):
excitement from his nose to the tip of his tail,
and behind him were the cruel boys, dancing with joy
and setting the dog on. The poor creature would disappear
in the water in terror, but he must breathe, and
out would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time.
At last the water ran out of the hole as
well as in, and the soaked beast came with it
(08:33):
and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the
dog had him, and the boys stood off in a
circle with stones in their hands to see what they
called fair play. They maintained perfect neutrality so long as
the dog was getting the best of the woodchuck, But
if the latter was likely to escape, they interfered in
the interest of peace and the balance of power, and
(08:56):
killed the woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice.
Of course, he'd no business to be a woodchuck, an
unspeakable woodchuck. I used the word aromatic in relation to
the New England soil. John knew very well all its sweet, aromatic,
pungent and medicinal products, and liked to search for the
scented herbs and the wild fruits and exquisite flowers. But
(09:19):
he did not then know, and few do know, that
there is no part of the globe where the subtile
chemistry of the earth produces more that is agreeable to
the senses than a new England hill pasture and the
green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded in
turning our attention from it to the comparatively barren orient
as the land of sweet smelling spices and odorous gums.
(09:40):
And it is indeed a constant surprise that this poor
and stony soil elaborates and grows so many delicate and
aromatic products. John, it is true, did not care much
for anything that did not appeal to his taste and
smell and delight in brilliant color. And he trod down
the exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses without compunction. But
(10:00):
he gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine
and the egglantine, and the blue hairbell. He picked the
high flavored alpine strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants,
and gooseberries, and fox grapes. He brought some armfuls of
the pink and white laurel and the wild honeysuckle. He
dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of the
(10:20):
sweet flag. He ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen
and its red berries. He gathered the peppermint and the spearmint.
He gnawed the twigs of the black birch. There was
a stout fern which he called brake, which he pulled
up and found that the soft end tasted good. He
dug the amber gum from the spruce tree, and liked
to smell, though he could not chew the gum of
(10:41):
the wild cherry. It was his melancholy duty to bring
home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold thread,
the tansy, and the loathsome bone set, and he laid
in for the winter like a squirrel, stores of beech nuts,
hazel nuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which
lives most vividly in his memory, and most strongly draws
(11:02):
him back to the New England hills is the aromatic
sweet fern. He likes to eat, its spicy seeds and
a crush in his hands its fragrant leaves. Their odor
is the unique essence of New England. End of Chapter fifteen.
Recording by Mark Penfold,
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