e
'twa'n't a squeerrel; 'twas a maouse;" and the boys had that for a
by-word. They despised Yankees as a mean-spirited race, who were stingy
and would cheat; and would not hit you if you told them they lied. A
person must always hit a person who told him he lied; but even if you
called a Yankee a _fighting_ liar (the worst form of this insult), he
would not hit you, but just call you a liar back. My boy long accepted
these ideas of New England as truly representative of the sectional
character. Perhaps they were as fair as some ideas of the West which he
afterwards found entertained in New England; but they were false and
stupid all the same.

If the boys could do little with the Hydraulic, they were at no loss in
regard to the Reservoirs, into which its feeding waters were gathered
and held in reserve, I suppose, against a time of drought. There was the
Little Reservoir first, and then a mile beyond it the Big Reservoir, and
there was nearly always a large flat boat on each which was used for
repairing the banks, but which the boys employed as a pleasure-barge. It
seemed in some natural way to belong to them, and yet they had a feeling
of something clandestine in pushing out on the Reservoir in it. Once
they filled its broad, shallow hold with straw from a neighboring
oatfield, and spent a long golden afternoon in simply lying under the
hot September sun, in the middle of the Reservoir, and telling stories.
My boy then learned, for the first time, that there was such a book as
the "Arabian Nights;" one of the other boys told stories out of it, and
he inferred that the sole copy in existence belonged to this boy. He
knew that they all had school-books alike, but it did not occur to him
that a book which was not a Reader or a Speller was ever duplicated.
They did nothing with their boat except loll in it and tell stories, and
as there was no current in the Reservoir, they must have remained pretty
much in the same place; but they had a sense of the wildest adventure,
which mounted to frenzy, when some men rose out of the earth on the
shore, and shouted at them, "Hello, there! What are you doing with that
boat?" They must have had an oar; at any rate, they got to the opposite
bank, and, springing to land, fled somewhere into the vaguest past.

The boys went in swimming in the Little Reservoir when they were not in
the River or the Basin; and they fished in the Big Reservoir, where the
sunfish bit eagerly. There were larg