ood as dipping them into
the sugar-bowl at home. Each precious note contained a lock or curl
of girl's hair,--a rare collection of all colors, after John had been
in school many terms, and had passed through a great many parting
scenes,--black, brown, red, tow-color, and some that looked like spun
gold and felt like silk. The sentiment contained in the notes was
that which was common in the school, and expressed a melancholy
foreboding of early death, and a touching desire to leave hair enough
this side the grave to constitute a sort of strand of remembrance.
With little variation, the poetry that made the hair precious was in
the words, and, as a Cockney would say, set to the hair, following:

"This lock of hair,
Which I did wear,
Was taken from my head;
When this you see,
Remember me,
Long after I am dead."

John liked to read these verses, which always made a new and fresh
impression with each lock of hair, and he was not critical; they were
for him vehicles of true sentiment, and indeed they were what he used
when he inclosed a clip of his own sandy hair to a friend. And it
did not occur to him until he was a great deal older and less
innocent, to smile at them. John felt that he would sacredly keep
every lock of hair intrusted to him, though death should come on the
wings of cholera and take away every one of these sad, red-ink
correspondents. When John's big brother one day caught sight of
these treasures, and brutally told him that he "had hair enough to
stuff a horse-collar," John was so outraged and shocked, as he should
have been, at this rude invasion of his heart, this coarse
suggestion, this profanation of his most delicate feeling, that he
was kept from crying only by the resolution to "lick" his brother as
soon as ever he got big enough.

VIII

THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING

One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts,
hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after
the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken
them, and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright
October day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is
nothing quite so exhilarating as going nutting. Nor is the pleasure
of it altogether destroyed for the boy by the consideration that he
is making himself useful in obtaining supplies for the winter
household. The getting-in of potatoes and corn is a different thing;
that is the prose,