, firing beans at us from the rear, accelerated our pace to a
frightful degree. Fortunately again, like Hamlet, he was "fat and
scant o' breath," and we could run like deer, which we did. _En route_
I grabbed my shirt with one hand and those cream-colored pants with the
other.

The mud of that pond was the thick, black, sticky kind. It stained
hideously anything light that it touched, as irrevocably as sin. Those
trousers had been clasped against my boyish muddy breast or flapped
against my muddy, skinny legs, and they were {319} a sight to behold!
There was no water available for miles where we stopped. We rubbed
ourselves off with the burnt grass of August and dusty leaves as well
as we could, dressed ourselves and repaired home.

I was a melancholy picture. The leopard could have changed his spots
as easily as I. Yet I well remember the mixture of fierce joy and
terrified apprehension that pervaded me. I arrived home about
dinner-time. Father was there. "Wh--what!" he cried in astonishment.
"Where have you been, sir?"

"Those," sobbed my mother in anguished tones, "were your father's
wedding trousers! I gave them to you with reluctance and as a great
favor, you wretched boy, and--and--you have ruined them."

I was taken upstairs, thoroughly washed, scrubbed--in the tub, which
was bad enough--and when sufficiently clean to be handed to my father,
he and I had an important interview in the wood-shed--our penal
institution--over which it were well to draw the curtain. There was a
happy result to the adventure, however: I never wore the cream-colored
pants again, and hence my joy. The relief was almost worth the licking.

Some of the material, however, was worked up into a patchwork quilt,
and of the rest my mother made a jacket for my sister. My mother could
not look upon those things without tears; neither could I! Why is it
that grown people will be so inconsiderate about a little boy's clothes?

It was the fashion of many years before I was born for people--that is,
men and boys--to wear shawls. There was a dearth in the family
exchequer on one occasion--on many occasions, I may say, but this {320}
was a particular one. I had no overcoat, at least not one suitable for
Sunday, and really it would have been preposterous to have attempted to
cut down one of father's for me. That feat was beyond even my mother's
facile scissors, and she could effect marvels with them, I knew to my
cost. It was a