ngs; the day belonged to St. Nicholas. The first thing when
you woke you tried to catch everybody, and you caught a person if you
said "Christmas Gift!" before he or she did; and then the person you
caught had to give you a present. Nobody ever said "Merry Christmas!"
as people do now; and I do not know where the custom of saying
"Christmas Gift" came from. It seems more sordid and greedy than it
really was; the pleasure was to see who could say it first; and the boys
did not care for what they got if they beat, any more than they cared
for what they won in fighting eggs at Easter.

At New-Year's the great thing was to sit up and watch the old year out;
but the little boys could not have kept awake even if their mothers had
let them. In some families, perhaps of Dutch origin, the day was kept
instead of Christmas, but for most of the fellows it was a dull time.
You had spent all your money at Christmas, and very likely burst your
pistol, anyway. It was some consolation to be out of school, which did
not keep on New-Year's; and if it was cold you could have fires on the
ice; or, anyway, you could have fires on the river-bank, or down by the
shore, where there was always plenty of drift-wood.

But New-Year's could not begin to compare with Easter. All the boys'
mothers colored eggs for them at Easter; I do not believe there was a
mother in the Boy's Town mean enough not to. By Easter Day, in that
Southern region, the new grass was well started, and grass gave a
beautiful yellow color to the eggs boiled with it. Onions colored them a
soft, pale green, and logwood, black; but the most esteemed egg of all
was a calico-egg. You got a piece of new calico from your mother, or
maybe some of your aunts, and you got somebody (most likely your
grandmother, if she was on a visit at the time) to sew an egg up in it;
and when the egg was boiled it came out all over the pattern of the
calico. My boy's brother once had a calico-egg that seemed to my boy a
more beautiful piece of color than any Titian he has seen since; it was
kept in a bureau-drawer till nobody could stand the smell. But most
Easter eggs never outlasted Easter Day. As soon as the fellows were done
breakfast they ran out of the house and began to fight eggs with the
other fellows. They struck the little ends of the eggs together, and if
your egg broke another fellow's egg, then you had a right to it.
Sometimes an egg was so hard that it would break every other egg in the