tance to us then. Even our elders did not go there very
often.

In those early days, towns used to give each other nicknames, like
schoolboys. Ours was called "Bean-town" not because it was especially
devoted to the cultivation of this leguminous edible, but probably
because it adhered a long time to the Puritanic custom of saving
Sunday-work by baking beans on Saturday evening, leaving them in the
oven over night. After a while, as families left off heating their
ovens, the bean-pots were taken by the village baker on Saturday
afternoon, who returned them to each house early on Sunday morning with
the pan of brown bread that went with them. The jingling of the baker's
bells made the matter a public one.

The towns through which our stage-coach passed sometimes called it the
"bean-pot." The Jehn who drove it was something of a wag. Once, coming
through Charlestown, while waiting in the street for a resident
passenger, he was hailed by another resident who thought him
obstructing the passage, with the shout,--

"Halloo there! Get your old bean-pot out of the way!"

"I will, when I have got my pork in," was the ready reply. What the
sobriquet of Charlestown was, need not be explained.

We had a good opportunity to watch both coaches, as my father's shop
was just at the head of the lane, and we went to school upstairs in the
same building. After he left off going to sea,--before my birth,--my
father took a store for the sale of what used to be called "West India
goods," and various other domestic commodities.

The school was kept by a neighbor whom everybody called "Aunt Hannah."
It took in all the little ones about us, no matter how young they were,
provided they could walk and talk, and were considered capable of
learning their letters.

A ladder-like flight of stairs on the outside of the house led up to
the schoolroom, and another flight, also outside, took us down into a
bit of a garden, where grew tansy and spearmint and southernwood and
wormwood, and, among other old-fashioned flowers, an abundance of
many-tinted four o'clocks, whose regular afternoon-opening just at the
close of school, was a daily wonder to us babies. From the schoolroom
window we could watch the slow hands of the town clock and get a peep
at what was going on in the street, although there was seldom anybody
in sight except the Colonel's gardener or coachman, going into or out
of the driveway directly opposite. It was a very still street;