ingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of my childhood
were spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where Glory
Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant
woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted
a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to
the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited,
and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the
beaten tracks of travel, but which bore a name that thrilled us.

When we alighted from the train, a large factory greeted our vision,
across the road from the railway station. We walked up a faintly
familiar street to the village square. There we paused, with wry
faces. Six trolley lines converged in its centre, and out of the
surrounding country were rolling in great cars, as big almost as
Pullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut trees that once lined the
walks were down, to expose more brazenly to view the rows of tawdry
little shops. These trees had once furnished shade and ammunition. I
had to smile at the sign above the new fish-market--

IF IT SWIMS--WE HAVE IT.

But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, rising
behind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of
the old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses had
disappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the head
of the common looked down benignly, unchanged.

"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old Hundred murmured, as we
hastened northward, out of the village.

After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, "It ought to be
around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anything
out, for these new houses."

"There was a lane down to it," said I, "and woods beyond."

"Sure," he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman's
field."

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. "Come on down to
Kingman's, fellers," I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch,
in somebody's back yard. It was very small.

"This ain't Kingman's," wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar
in his grief. "Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over
right field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!"

There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. "See," said I,
trying to be cheerful, "here