each other. Just then a Joblily
went by with a cabbage leaf.

"What is that?" asked one of the little girls of our party.

"A cabbage leaf to make an apple pie," he replied, without looking
around.

Presently a Pickaninny came along with a small keg in his hands.

"What is that?" asked the same curious little girl.

"Gunpowder for the heels of their boots," he answered, and went on.

And a spark of fire from one of the seventy-seven chimneys fell into the
keg, and there was a frightful explosion.

But I don't think it was the Panjandrum's house that got blown up, but we
ourselves, for we found ourselves outside in the woods going home from
Shuteyetown. I for one resolved that the next time I came to the rainbow
with one foot in the valley and the other in the mountain. I should climb
to the upper end of it.

Stories Told on a Cellar-door.

THE STORY OF A FLUTTER-WHEEL.

What queer places boys have of assembling. Sometimes in one place,
sometimes in another. Hay-mows, river-banks, threshing-floors, these were
the old places of resort for country boys. And nothing was so sweet to
me, when I was a boy, as the newly cut clover-hay where I sat with two or
three companions, watching the barn swallows chattering their
incomprehensible gabble and gossip from the doors of their mud houses in
the rafters. And what stories we told and what talks we had. In the city
who does not remember the old-fashioned cellar-door, sloping down to the
ground? These were always places of resort.

Tom Miller was the minister's son, and there was a party of boys who met
regularly on Parson Miller's cellar-door. Mrs. Miller used herself to
listen to the stories they told, as she sat by the window above them,
though they were unconscious of her presence. They were boys full of life
and ambition, but they were a good set of boys on the whole, and it was
not till lessons were learned and work done that they met thus on the
cellar-door. They belonged to the same class in school, and besides were
"cronies" in all respects. There was Tom Miller, the minister's son, who
intended to be a minister himself, and Jimmy Jackson, the shoemaker's
boy, as full of fun and playfulness as a kitten, and poor Will Sampson,
who stammered, and Harry Wilson, the son of a wealthy banker, and a brave
boy too, and John Harlan, the widow's son, pale and slender, the pet of
all, and great, stout Hans Schlegal, w