ng-room, lie
six white Lima beans, and three small red-spotted apples. Wild fruit
they are, cast by a superannuated crab, spared by the woodman's axe
because it stands on the verge of the orchard. The apple-pickers never
look under it for gleanings. The beans were pulled from a frost-bitten
vine in the garden, and shelled with difficulty, the pods being tough,
and Boy's fingers tender. Both trophies secured, they were brought
into the house, deposited in the safest place Boy's ingenuity could
devise, and, alas! forgotten in the hurry of catching the "twain."
There was no room for them in Boy's long-suffering pockets. They
bulged to the bursting point with chestnuts, also the spoil of the
grasping little fingers.

Boy is city-born and city-bred, and a day in the country is better
than a thousand in street and park. A day in the woods, when chestnuts
and walnuts hustle down with every breath of air, and the hollows are
knee-deep with painted leaves, has joys the eager tongue trips over
itself in the endeavor to recount. Boy and Boy's mother took the six
o'clock train to town last night. This morning, throwing open the
parlor blinds, I espy the six flat, white beans and the three
red-speckled crab-apples. They were so much to the owner; except for
the value imparted by association with the dancing blue eyes and the
tight clutch of fingers that had green stains on them when the wrestle
with the pods was over, they are so much more than worthless to
everybody else--that there is infinite pathos in the litter. It is
picturesque and poetic.

There will be no poetry, picturesqueness or pathos in the litter when
Boy is older by a year or two. His leavings in outlandish places will
become "trash," and still later on "rubbish" and "hateful." At twelve
years of age he will be a "hulking boy," and convicted of bringing
more dirt into the house upon one pair of soles than three pairs of
hands can clean up. Eyes that fill now in surveying the tokens of his
recent occupations and his lordly disregard of conventionalities, will
flash petulantly upon books left, face downward, over night, on the
piazza floor; muddy shoes kicked into the corner of the hall; the
half-whittled cane and open knife on the sofa, and coats and caps
everywhere except upon the hooks intended for them.

I once heard a grown-up beauty declare in the presence and hearing of
a half-grown brother, that, "every boy should be put under a barrel at
fourteen, and kept