of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step
beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the
sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a
notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path.
Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out.
She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long
striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The
horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent
with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.

I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is
nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin,
stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley
which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh
filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night.
Beyond was a wooded mountain.

This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for
I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the
odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a
prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass,
and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his
plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!

The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for
there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite
runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass,"
she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."--At night this teeming
bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and
wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond--only the
door yard and the road seemed safe for little men--and even there I
wished my mother to be within immediate call.

My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could
not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do
so, till his land was paid for--but at last in 1863 on the very day that
he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the
roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.

I have heard my mother say that this