A Tale of the Tow-Path — Reading Notes

THE RESULT OF A WHIPPING.

Hoeing corn is not very hard work for one who is accustomed to it, but the circumstances of the hoeing may make the task an exceedingly laborious one. They did so in Joe Gaston’s case. Joe Gaston thought he had never in his life before been put to such hard and disagreeable work.

In the first place, the ground had been broken up only that spring, and it was very rough and stony. Next, the field was on a western slope, and the rays of the afternoon sun shone squarely on it. It was an unusually oppressive day, too, for the last of June.

Finally, and chiefly: Joe was a fourteen-year-old boy, fond of sport and of companionship, and he was working there alone.

Leaning heavily on the handle of his hoe, Joe gazed pensively away to the west. At the foot of the slope lay a small lake, its unruffled surface reflecting with startling distinctness the foliage that lined its shores, and the two white clouds that hung above in the blue sky.

Through a rift in the hills could be seen, far away, the line of purple mountains that lay beyond the west shore of the Hudson River.

“It aint fair!” said Joe, talking aloud to himself, as he sometimes did. “I don’t have time to do anything but just work, work, work. Right in the middle of summer, too, when you can have the most fun of any time in the year, if you only had a chance to get it! There’s berrying and bee-hunting and swimming and fishing and--and lots of things.”

The look of pensiveness on Joe’s face changed into one of longing.

“Fishing’s awful good now,” he continued; “but I don’t get a chance to go, unless I go without asking, and even then I dassent carry home the fish.”

After another minute of reflection he turned his face toward the upland, where, in the distance, the white porch and gables of a farmhouse were visible through an opening between two rows of orchard trees.

“I guess I’ll just run down to the pond a few minutes, and see if there’s any fish there. It aint more’n three o’clock; Father’s gone up to Morgan’s with that load of hay, and he won’t be home before five o’clock. I can get back and hoe a lot of corn by that time.”

He cast his eyes critically toward the sun, hesitated for another minute, and then, shouldering his hoe, started down the hill toward the lake; but before he had gone half-way to the water’s edge he stopped and stood still, nervously chewing a spear of June-grass, and glancing alternately back at the cornfield and forward to the tempting waters of the lake.

“I don’t care!” he said at last. “I can’t help it if it aint right. If Father’d only _let_ me go a-fishing once in a while, I wouldn’t want to sneak off. It’s his fault; ’cause I’ve got to fish, and that’s all there is about it.”

In a swampy place near by he dug some angle-worms for bait. Then, taking a pole and line from the long grass behind a log, he skirted the shore for a short distance, climbed out on the body of a fallen tree that lay partly in the water, and flung off his line.

Joe had not long to wait. The lazy motion of the brightly painted float on the smooth surface of the lake gave place to a sudden swinging movement. Then the small end dipped till only the round red top was visible. In the next instant that too disappeared, and the pole curved till the tip of it almost touched the water.

For a second only Joe played with his victim. Then, with a quick, steady pull, he drew the darting, curving, shining fish from its home, and landed it among the weeds on the shore.

Flushed with delight, he hastened to cast his line again into the pool. Scarcely a minute later he pulled out another fish. It seemed to be an excellent day for the sport.

Indeed, he had never before known the fish to bite so well. They kept him busy baiting his hook and drawing them in.

He was in the high tide of enjoyment. The cornfield was forgotten.

Suddenly he became aware that some one was standing behind him among the low bushes on the shore. He turned to see who it was. There, confronting him, a frown on his face, stood Joe’s father.