red the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter
kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but
the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people.
Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black
walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks,
as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go
walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they
were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the
fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thought
necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and
that a boy had to make a new wagon every year.

No boy's walnut wagon could last till the next year; it did very well if
it lasted till the next day. He had to make it nearly all with his
pocket-knife. He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine
board, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of the
blocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness,
and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape,
and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, and
he made the hubs with it. He could get a tongue ready-made if he used a
broom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittled
so it could be fastened to the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes
with his knife if he could not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an
auger, he bored the holes through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and
then whittled them large enough with his knife. He had to use pine for
nearly everything, because any other wood was too hard to whittle; and
then the pine was always splitting. It split in the axles when he was
making the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins
that were tied in; the wheels themselves split, and had to be
strengthened by slats nailed across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a
candle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front axle tight, so
that it took the whole width of a street to turn a very little wagon in
without upsetting.

When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his
brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He
started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost
still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops
and the roof o