zen's character for cleverness or meanness was fixed by his walking
round or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginia sense for
amiability; a person who was clever in the English sense was smart.

RACES

When the warm weather came on in April, and the boys got off their shoes
for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life
has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so
ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of
our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from
the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and
cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees. His blood leaps
as wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into their arms
in June; there is something even finer and sweeter in the rapture of the
earlier bliss. The day will not be long enough for his flights, his
races; he aches more with regret than with fatigue when he must leave
the happy paths under the stars outside, and creep into his bed. It is
all like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time when the
earth and her sons shall be reconciled in a deathless love, and they
shall not be thankless, nor she a stepmother any more.

[Illustration]

About the only drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, which
you were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and before
you had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toe
against a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hopped
about a hundred yards before you could bear to put it to the ground.
Then you sat down, and held it as tight as you could, and cried over it,
till the fellows helped you to the pump to wash the blood off. Then, as
soon as you could, you limped home for a rag, and kept pretty quiet
about it so as to get out again without letting on to your mother.

A MEAN TRICK

There were shade-trees all along the street, that you could climb if you
wanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had run yourself
out of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctly remembered that
under one of these trees his elder brother first broached to him that
awful scheme of reform about fibbing, and applied to their own lives the
moral of _The Trippings of Tom Pepper_; he remembered how a conviction
of the righteousness of the scheme sank into his soul, and he could not
withhold his conse