ike 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, but nutting
is the poetry, of farm life. I am not sure but the boy would find it
very irksome, though, if he were obliged to work at nut-gathering in
order to procure food for the family. He is willing to make himself
useful in his own way. The Italian boy, who works day after day at a
huge