lors eggs a very nice yellow; it used to worry me that it
didn't color them green. When the grass hadn't got along far enough,
winter wheat would do as well. I don't remember what color onion husks
would give; but we used onion husks, too. Some mothers would let the
boys get logwood from the drug-store, and that made the eggs a fine,
bold purplish black. But the greatest egg of all was a calico egg, that
you got by coaxing your grandmother (your mother's mother) or your aunt
(your mother's sister) to sew up in a tight cover of brilliant calico.
When that was boiled long enough the colors came off in a perfect
pattern on the egg. Very few boys could get such eggs; when they did,
they put them away in bureau drawers till they ripened and the mothers
smelt them, and threw them out of the window as quickly as possible.
Always, after breakfast, Easter Morning, we came out on the street and
fought eggs. We pitted the little ends of the eggs against one another,
and the fellow whose egg cracked the other fellow's egg won it, and he
carried it off. I remember grass and wheat colored eggs in such trials
of strength, and onion and logwood colored eggs; but never calico eggs;
_they_ were too precious to be risked; it would have seemed wicked.

"I don't know," the Boston man went musingly on, "why I should remember
these things so relentlessly; I've forgotten all the important things
that happened to me then; but perhaps these were the important things.
Who knows? I only know I've always had a soft spot in my heart for
Easter, not so much because of the calico eggs, perhaps, as because of
the grandmothers and the aunts. I suppose the simple life is full of
such aunts and grandmothers still; but you don't find them in hotel
apartments, or even in flats consisting of seven large, light rooms and
bath." We all recognized the language of the advertisements, and laughed
in sympathy with our guest, who perhaps laughed out of proportion with a
pleasantry of that size.

When he had subdued his mirth, he resumed at a point apparently very
remote from that where he had started.

"There was one of those winters in Cambridge, where I lived then, that
seemed tougher than any other we could remember, and they were all
pretty tough winters there in those times. There were forty snowfalls
between Thanksgiving and Fast Day--you don't know what Fast Day is in
New York, and we didn't, either, as far as the fasting went--and the
cold kept on and on