he didn't mean
to go back on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how
they got along so well as they did with so little."

"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one
dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this
field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds
contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in
expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when
he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't
so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with
dignity ought to have been offended by such an act."

Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was
left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his
boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses,
though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his
early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near
his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he
wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted
country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged
straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as
I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you.
Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew."

One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to
take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard,
we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through
the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on
across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came
to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood.

How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer
noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that
coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in
the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey
down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red
sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to
make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods
have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to
school and gather crinkle-root to ea