When Life Was Young

A boyhood on a Maine farm just after the Civil War: six cousins, a grandmother's rule, the sugar bush, the hayfield, the district school and the long winters. C. A. Stephens wrote for The Youth's Companion for sixty years and this is his own childhood, barely altered. The work is described in detail — nobody in the book is idle for a page — and the humour comes out of the labour. Fifty-four plates of farm and village life by painters including Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer extend the world of the book across the seasons of a New England year.