d boy-law--was for kicking purposes.

Plunging through banks of dry leaves along the edge of the
sidewalk-knee-deep sometimes--scattering them in all directions, even
about our heads--there was such a racket that we could scarcely hear
each other's shouts of glee. And we'd run through them only to dive
exhausted into some huge pile of them, rolling and kicking and
hollering until some kid came along and chucked an armful, dirt and
all, plumb into our face! This was the signal for a battle of
leaves--and perhaps there would have been fewer tardy-marks, teacher,
if there had been fewer autumn leaves along the route ... Perhaps!

There were influences that tempered the joys of leaf-kicking--some
"meanie" was always ready to hide a big rock, or other disagreeable
foreign substance, under a particularly inviting bunch of leaves--then
watch and giggle at your discomfiture when you came innocently
ploughing along!

What a riot of wonderful color they made just after the first frosts
had turned their green to red and gold and brown! As a boy I disdained
so weak a thing as noticing the coloring on Big Hill--but now, in the
long-after years, I realize that its vivid Autumn garment was
indestructibly fixed in my memory and has lived--saved for me until I
could look back through Time's long glass and understand and love that
glorious picture. Not even the brush of a Barbizon master could tell
the story of Big Hill, three miles up the river from Main Street
bridge, gleaming in the hues that Jack Frost mixed, beneath the
blue-gold dome of a cloudless sky--for it could not paint the chatter
of the squirrel, or the glint of the bursting bittersweet berry, or the
call of the crow, or the crisp of the air, or the joy of life that only
boyhood knows!

Getting in the Wood

An autumnal event of importance, second only to the filling of the
meat-house, was the purchase and sawing of the wood.

Three sizes, remember--the 4-foot lengths for the long, low stove in
the Big Room, 12-inch "chunks" for the oval sheet-iron stove in the
parlor, and the fine-split 18-inch lengths for the kitchen. (Yes, they
burned wood in the kitchen--not only wood, but oak and maple and
hickory--the kind you buy by the carat nowadays!)

And what a fire it made! Two sticks of the long wood in the stove in
the Big Room, and the damper open, and you'd have to raise the windows
inside of fifteen minutes no matter how low the thermometer registered
outsid