ought
necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and
that a boy had to make a new wagon every year. No boy's walnut wagon
could last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till the
next day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He could
use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use a
hatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use his
knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round
then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He
whittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. He
could get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole,
but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened to
the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he could
not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holes
through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them large
enough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, because
any other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was always
splitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes,
and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; the
wheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailed
across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles,
and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of a
street to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.

[Illustration: FORAGING.]

When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his
brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He
started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost
still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops
and the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get
there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them
was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and
around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay
scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still
yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to
the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,
wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped from
the trees overhead, and the branches outlined the