ed home, the sticky
ooze having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps of mud, with which
my own clothes also were soiled. I had to drag or carry her all the
way, for she could not or would not walk a step. And alas for the
morocco boots! They were never again red. I also received a scolding
for not taking better care of my little sister, and I was not very soon
allowed again to have her company in my rambles.

We usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out-of-door
amusement near home. And our sports, as well as our books, had a spice
of Merry Old England. They were full of kings and queens, and made
sharp contrasts, as well as odd mixtures, with the homeliness of our
everyday life.

One of them, a sort of rhymed dialogue, began with the couplet:--

"Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sits in the sun,
As fair as a lady, as white as a nun."

If "Queen Anne" did not give a right guess as to which hand of the
messenger held the king's letter to her, she was contemptuously
informed that she was

"as brown as a bun."

In another name, four little girls joined hands across, in couples,
chanting:--

"I wish my father were a king,
I wish my mother were a queen,
And I a little companion!"

concluding with a close embrace in a dizzying whirl, breathlessly
shouting all together,--

"A bundle of fagots! A bundle of fagots!"

In a third, which may have begun with a juvenile reacting of the
Colonial struggle for liberty, we ranged ourselves under two leaders,
who made an archway over our heads of their lifted hands and arms,
saying, as we passed beneath,--

"Lift up the gates as high as the sky,
And let King George and his army pass by!"

We were told to whisper "Oranges" or "Lemons" for a pass-word; and
"Oranges" always won the larger enlistment, whether British or American.

And then there was "Grandmother Gray," and the

"Old woman from Newfoundland,
With all her children in her hand;"

and the

"Knight from Spain
Inquiring for your daughter Jane,"

and numberless others, nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old World
flavor. One of our play-places was an unoccupied end of the
burying-ground, overhung by the Colonel's apple-trees and close under
his wall, so that we should not be too near the grave-stones.

I do not think that death was at all a real thing to me or to my
brothers and sisters at this time. We lived so near the graveyard that
it seemed merely the exte