for months and often displayed in triumph to
penniless companions. Poor indeed are they who have never known the day
of small things and the size of a cent. It is said money is only good
for what it will buy, and the miser who hoards is the scoff of mankind.
I must have been a descendant of Shylock for I loved cents for
themselves and the feeling of importance they gave me. I polished them
until they shone like gold and the face of the Father of his Country
gleamed with irridescent benignity. Some were hopelessly worn and
battered; some had a hole in them or a piece nicked out of the rim.
These I exchanged with my mother for more perfect ones which I could
burnish.

For children, berrying was play, pure pastime; it brought no money to
their pockets. For the first hour it was infinitely exciting; by the
next, we wanted something else, and it was difficult to keep us in
order. What to do next is an eternal question that has followed both
children and man from Eden. It is usually resolved by doing the same
thing over again.

A little boy once sat discontentedly on the bank of a river. A traveller
asked him what was the matter. He answered "I want to be on the other
side of the stream." "What for?" inquired the traveller. "So that I
could come back here," said the restless boy.

To hide and play games was one means of escape from the fatigue of the
slow filling berry pails. Then such quiet fell over the pasture that our
elders knew some mischief was afoot. We were promptly discovered,
scolded and warned that we must fill our pails before we could play.

As milking time approached we gathered up stray hats, aprons and
handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks
with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of
the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung
down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in
single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping
and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as
could be found in a community enshrouded in the black cloak of John
Calvin. What a good time it was to be alive, and never is a boy so young
as in the berry pasture, nor any place so full of enchantments. She--for
it was never a boy--who had picked the most berries that day, headed the
band and was a proud and envied person. Our elders cherished this
emulation. I was always thinking tha