arouse. He was prepared to make the most of
this, and his groans grew louder as he drew near home in the arms of the
boys who took turns, two and two, in carrying him the whole long way
from Dayton Lane, with a terrified procession of alternates behind them.
These all ran as soon as they came in sight of his house and left the
last pair to deliver him to his mother. They never knew whether she
forgave him fully, or merely waited till he got well. You never could
tell how a boy's mother was going to act in any given case; mothers were
so very apt to act differently.

Red haws came a little before chinquepins. The trees grew mostly by the
First Lock, and the boys gathered the haws when they came out from
swimming in the canal. They did not take bags to gather haws, as they
did chinquepins; the fruit was not thought worthy of that honor; but
they filled their pockets with them and ate them on the way home. They
were rather nice, with a pleasant taste between a small apple and a rose
seed-pod; only you had to throw most of them away because they were
wormy. Once when the fellows were gathering haws out there they began to
have fun with a flock of turkeys, especially the gobblers, and one boy
got an old gobbler to following him while he walked slowly backward, and
teased him. The other boys would not have told him for anything when
they saw him backing against a low stump. When he reached it, his head
went down and his heels flew into the air, and then the gobbler hopped
upon him and began to have some of the fun himself. The boys always
thought that if they had not rushed up all together and scared the
gobbler off, he would have torn the boy to pieces, but very likely he
would not. He probably intended just to have fun with him.

The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts,
and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter
kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but
the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people.
Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black
walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks,
as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go
walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they
were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the
fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was th