below the city, and we wandered and played all the way down to the Point
House. On these trips we caught sun-fish, roach, cat-fish, and sometimes
perch, and always brought them home. We generally got prodigiously
hungry from the exercise we took, and sat down on the thick grass under
a tree to eat our scanty dinners. These dinner-times came very early in
the day; and long before it was time to go home in the afternoon, we
became even more hungry than we had been in the morning,--but our
baskets had been emptied.

I think these young days, with these innocent sports and recreations,
were among the happiest of my life. I do not think the fish we caught
were of much account, though father was always glad to see them; and I
remember how he took each one of our baskets, as we came into the
kitchen, looked into it, and turned over and counted the fishes it
contained. My brother Fred generally had the most, and I had the fewest:
but it seems that even for other things than fishes I never had a taking
way about me. Father was very fond of them, for mother had a way of
frying their little thin bodies into a nice brown crisp, which made us
all a good breakfast. So father had made us lines, with corks and hooks,
tied them to nice little poles, and showed us how to use them and keep
them in order, and had a corner in the shed in which he taught us to set
them up out of harm's way. Occasionally he even went with us to the
meadows himself.

But while I am speaking of these dear times, I must say that we always
came home happy, though tired and dirty. Sometimes we got into great
mud-holes along the ditch-bank, so deep as to leave a shoe sticking
fast, compelling us to trudge home with only one. Then, when we found a
place where the fish bit sharply, all of us rushed to the spot, and
pushed into the wild rose-bushes that grew in clumps upon the bank: for
I generally noticed, that, where the bushes overhung the water and made
a little shade, the fish were most abundant. In the scramble to secure a
good foothold, the briers tore our clothes and bonnets, sometimes so as
to make us fairly ragged, besides scratching our hands and faces
terribly. Occasionally one of us slipped into the ditch, and was helped
out dripping wet; but we never mentioned such an incident at home. Then
more than once we were caught in a heavy shower, with nothing but a
rose-bush or a willow-tree for shelter; and there were often so many of
us that it was like a he