mselves against the
blue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallen
fruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send them
plumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, and
the nuts almost leaped into the boys' hands. The boys ran, some of them
to gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beat
them from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick off
his shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut was
still clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of
grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows
of a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, where
the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss them
into a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of
that they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on
their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for
days that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one
another's faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.

The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and
while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and
hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one
of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they would
start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their
shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good
luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone
home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I
have to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts
rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the
wagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always
would in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready to
drop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs
or rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get
the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because they
usually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made just
as much preparation for drying the nuts on the wood-shed roof whether
they got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stop
gathering them till they had two or three ba