ater was gathering may-apples, as
they called the fruit of the mandrake in that country. They grew to
their full size, nearly as large as a pullet's egg, some time in June,
and they were gathered green, and carried home to be ripened in the
cornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they were
ripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sour
thing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in the
pleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade of
the trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyous
sense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of the
sweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boy
comes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in the
wealth she never grudges to those who are willing to be merely rich
enough.

There were not many wild berries in the country near the Boy's Town, or
what seemed near; but sometimes my boy's father took him a great way off
to a region, long lost from the map, where there were blackberries. The
swimming lasted so late into September, however, that the boys began to
go for nuts almost as soon as they left off going into the water. They
began with the little acorns that they called chinquepins, and that were
such a pretty black, streaked upward from the cup with yellow, that they
gathered them half for the unconscious pleasure of their beauty. They
were rather bitter, and they puckered your mouth; but still you ate
them. They were easy to knock off the low oaks where they grew, and they
were so plentiful that you could get a peck of them in no time. There
was no need of anybody's climbing a tree to shake them; but one day the
boys got to telling what they would do if a bear came, and one of them
climbed a chinquepin-tree to show how he would get out on such a small
limb that the bear would be afraid to follow him; and he went so far out
on the limb that it broke under him. Perhaps he was heavier than he
would have been if he had not been carrying the load of guilt which
must burden a boy who is playing hookey. At any rate, he fell to the
ground, and lay there helpless while the other boys gathered round him,
and shared all the alarm he felt for his life. His despair of now hiding
the fact that he had been playing hookey was his own affair, but they
reasoned with him that the offence would be overlooked in the anxiety
which his disaster must