k to avoid it. They could cross Hudson
Street on the cobblestones with great effort, and in great danger of
being run over; but they could not possibly travel upon a brick
pavement, and avoid the cracks. What would have happened to them if they
_did_ step on a crack they did not exactly know. But, for all that, they
never stepped on cracks--of their own free will!

The Boy's earliest attempts at versification were found, the other day,
in an old desk, and at the end of almost half a century. The copy is in
his own boyish, ill-spelled print; and it bears no date. The present
owner, his aunt Henrietta, well remembers the circumstances and the
occasion, however, having been an active participant in the acts the
poem describes, although she avers that she had no hand in its
composition. The original, it seems, was transcribed by The Boy upon
the cover of a soap-box, which served as a head-stone to one of the
graves in his family burying-ground, situated in the back-yard of the
Hudson Street house, from which he was taken before he was nine years of
age. The monument stood against the fence, and this is the legend it
bore--rhyme, rhythm, metre, and orthography being carefully preserved:

"Three little kitens of our old cat
Were berrid this day in this grassplat.
They came to there deth in an old slop pale,
And after loosing their breth
They were pulled out by the tale.
These three little kitens have returned to their maker,
And were put in the grave by The Boy,
Undertaker."

At about this period The Boy officiated at the funeral of another cat,
but in a somewhat more exalted capacity. It was the Cranes' cat, at Red
Hook--a Maltese lady, who always had yellow kittens. The Boy does not
remember the cause of the cat's death, but he thinks that Uncle Andrew
Knox ran over her, with the "dyspepsia-wagon"--so called because it had
no springs. Anyway, the cat died, and had to be buried. The grave was
dug in the garden of the tavern, near the swinging-gate to the stable,
and the whole family attended the services. Jane Purdy, in a deep crape
veil, was the chief mourner; The Boy's aunts were pall-bearers, in white
scarves; The Boy was the clergyman; while the kittens--who did not look
at all like their mother--were on hand in a funeral basket, with black
shoestrings tied around their necks.

[Illustration: JANE PURDY]

Jane was supposed to be the disconsolate widow. She certainly looked the