ouses.

Our lane came to an end at some bars that let us into another lane,--or
rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields and orchards. We
were still on home ground, for my father's vegetable garden and orchard
were here. After a long straight stretch, the path suddenly took an
abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down wharf,
and there was the river!

An "arm of the sea" I was told that our river was, and it did seem to
reach around the town and hold it in a liquid embrace. Twice a day the
tide came in and filled its muddy bed with a sparkling flood. So it was
a river only half the time, but at high tide it was a river indeed; all
that a child could wish, with its boats and its sloops, and now and
then that most available craft for a crew of children--a gundalow. We
easily transformed the spelling into "gondola," and in fancy were
afloat on Venetian waters, under some overhanging balcony, perhaps at
the very Palace of the Doges,--willingly blind to the reality of a
mudscow leaning against some rickety wharf posts, covered with
barnacles.

Sometimes a neighbor boy who was the fortunate owner of a boat would
row us down the river a fearful, because a forbidden, joy. The widening
waters made us tremble with dread and longing for what might be beyond;
for when we had passed under the piers of the bridge, the estuary
broadened into the harbor and the open sea. Then somebody on board
would tell a story of children who had drifted away beyond the
harbor-bar and the light-house, and were drowned; and our boyish
helmsman would begin to look grave and anxious, and would turn his boat
and row us back swiftly to the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf.

The cars rush into the station now, right over our riverside
playground. I can often hear the mirthful shout of boys and girls under
the shriek of the steam whistle. No dream of a railroad had then come
to the quiet old town, but it was a wild train of children that ran
homeward in the twilight up the narrow lane, with wind-shod feet, and
hair flying like the manes of young colts, and light hearts bounding to
their own footsteps. How good and dear our plain, two-story
dwelling-house looked to us as we came in sight of it, and what sweet
odors stole out to meet us from the white-fenced inclosure of our small
garden,--from peach-trees and lilac-bushes in bloom, from bergamot and
balm and beds of camomile!

Sometimes we would find the pathetic figu