om this it was but another step to go to the shop
with him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process of
time the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a better
place to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would have
given whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloing
too loudly the boy's father would come up, and then they would all run.
It was considered mean in him, but the boy himself was awfully clever,
and the first thing the fellows knew they were back there again. Some
few of the boys had humming-tops, but though these pleased by their
noise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against the
good old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind up
with a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flat
button held between your forefinger and middle finger. Some of the boys
had a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could control
its course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of a baseball.

KITES

I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows who
had been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselves
playing something else. Kites came in just about the time of the
greatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not have
lasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, and
kept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, and
I suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth of
July. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, and
house kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carried
over the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did not
fly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it was
held in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the
smallest boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in
the form of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on
the Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a
kind of girl.

The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind best, and
flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was the
house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in the
form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the base
than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of a