n when, on the first hot day of June, you bade
him, "take it all off with the lawn-mower." (Do any boys have their
heads clean-clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talked
of fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew every
brook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next day
where Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or a
shave on the first of April, when "the law went off on trout."
Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Saturday, many a
pious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshaven
or untrimmed.

I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless they
have gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of our
vanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he sold
me when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shall
always cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never could
shave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only proved
himself thereby the ultimate Yankee.

[Illustration]

_The Button Box_

"Have you," said I, "anything like the ones left?"--and I held out to
my wife a shirt just back from the laundry, and minus a strategic
button.

"I'll look in my button box and see," she answered, taking the shirt.

Her button box! I did not know she had one, and followed her into her
retreat to see it. But alas! it was a grievous disappointment, being
nothing but a drawer set in some sort of a fancy contraption of
chintz-covered pasteboard, like a toy bureau, which stood on her work
table. No doubt it contained buttons, and was serviceable. But a
button box! To call it that were to libel a noble institution of an
elder day.

As I waited for the restoration of my shirt I thought tenderly of the
button box of my childhood. It was no dinky six-by-four-inch
pasteboard drawer, not two inches deep--no, sir! It was a cylindrical
wooden box of the substantial and finished workmanship which went into
even such humble things as a butter box a century ago, for mother had
inherited it from her mother. It must once have contained ten pounds
of butter, but all traces of its original service had long
disappeared. The drum, of very thin, tough wood, which had kept its
shape uncracked, had been polished a dark nut brown by countless
hands. The bottom and cover, of pine, were darkened, too, but without
p