f the woodshed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get
there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them
was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and
around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay
scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still
yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to
the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,
wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever.

[Illustration: NUTTING]

The leaves had dropped from the trees overhead, and the branches
outlined themselves against the blue sky, and dangled from their outer
stems clusters of the unfallen fruit, as large as oranges, and only
wanting a touch to send them plumping down into the grass where
sometimes their fat hulls burst, and the nuts almost leaped into the
boy's hands. The boys ran, some of them to gather the fallen nuts, and
others to get clubs and rocks to beat them from the trees; one was sure
to throw off his jacket and kick off his shoes and climb the tree to
shake every limb where a walnut was still clinging. When they had got
them all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree,
they began to hull them, with blows of a stick, or with stones, and to
pick the nuts from the hulls, where the grubs were battening on their
assured ripeness, and to toss them into a little heap, a very little
heap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from. The boys
gloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could,
for it would not wash off, and it showed for days that they had been
walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one another's faces with the
juice, and pretending they were Indians.

The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and
while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and
hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one
of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they would
start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their
shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good
luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone
home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I have
to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts
rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the