trade in
their father's office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole
day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts
on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be
sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard
thrown open for building-lots behind my boy's yard; but they could not
find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of
putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of
green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went
up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the
barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold,
and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the
points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple
almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as
you could see him.

On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was
not there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, towards
the end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, just
before school let out, the teacher--it was the one that whipped so, and
that the fellows all liked--rapped on his desk, and began to speak very
solemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom they
had played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick that
it was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lesson
about life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing and
uncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need never
be afraid to die.

Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see the
dying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to the
earth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as the
pillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed large
and strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys could
hear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, and
the light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knew
this one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room.

In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school did
not keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walked
in the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the