s; strawberries, small but of
potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence,
and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his
small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and
feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and
in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose
prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently
plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also
fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say,
and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would
hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the
topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was
a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled
with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and
cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.

The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was
thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an
upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them
for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores;
but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against
my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung
Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at
once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some
tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to
blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise
avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their
after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously
diabolical.

When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family
sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in
interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the
long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his
feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him.
Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we
would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate
trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning
with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft