s trap; but
none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father
had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide
in a hollow sycamore and screech until the little boys were terrified
and would not go alone to their traps for days. In summer, boys, usually
from the country, or from a neighbouring town, caught 'coons, and
dragged them chained through alleys for our boys to see, and 'Dory Paine
had an owl which was widely sought by other boys in the circus and
menagerie line. The boys of our town in that day seemed to live in the
wood and around the long millpond, though little fellows were afraid
that lurking Indians or camping gypsies might steal them--a boy's
superstition, which experience has proved too good to be true. They
fared forth to the riffle below the dam, which deepens in the shade
under the water elm; this was the pool known as "baby hole," despised of
the ten-year-olds, who plunged into the deepest of the thicket and came
out at the limekiln, where all day long one might hear "so-deep,
so-deep, so-deep," and "go-round, go-round, go-round," until school
commenced in the fall. Then the rattle of little homemade wagons, and
the shrilling of boy voices might be heard all over the wilderness, and
the black-stained hands of schoolboys told of the day of the walnut
harvest. It was nearly a mile from the schoolhouse to the woods, and yet
on winter afternoons no school-ma'am could keep the boys from using
school hours to dig out the screw-holes and heel-plates of their boots
before wadding them with paper. At four o'clock a troop of boys would
burst forth from that schoolhouse so wildly that General Durham of the
_Statesman_, whose office we used to pass with a roar, always looked up
from his work to say: "Well, I see hell's out for noon again."

In the spring the boys fished, and on Saturdays go, up the river or
down, or on either side, where one would, one was never out of sight of
some thoughtful boy, sitting either on a stump or on a log stretching
into the stream, or squatting on a muddy bank with his worm can beside
him, throwing a line into the deep, green, quiet water. Always it was to
the woods one went to find a lost boy, for the brush was alive with
fierce pirates, and blood-bound brother-hoods, and gory Indian fighters,
and dauntless scouts. Under the red clay banks that rose above the
sluggish stream, robbers' caves, and treasure houses, and freebooters'
dens,