ng sky, as the early winter sun was going down in the
west. It was a brisk, clear, metallic evening; the long drifts of snow
blushed crimson red on their tops, and lay in shades of purple and lilac
in the hollows; and the old wintry wind brushed shrewdly along the
plain, tingling people's noses, blowing open their cloaks, puffing in
the back of their necks, and showing other unmistakable indications that
he was getting up steam for a real roistering night.

"Hurrah! How it blows!" said little Dick Ward, from the top of the mossy
wood pile.

Now Dick had been sent to said wood pile, in company with his little
sister Grace, to pick up chips, which, every body knows, was in the
olden time considered a wholesome and gracious employment, and the
peculiar duty of the rising generation. But said Dick, being a boy, had
mounted the wood pile, and erected there a flagstaff, on which he was
busily tying a little red pocket handkerchief, occasionally exhorting
Grace "to be sure and pick up fast."

"O, yes, I will," said Grace; "but you see the chips have got ice on
'em, and make my hands so cold!"

"O, don't stop to suck your thumbs! Who cares for ice? Pick away, I say,
while I set up the flag of liberty."

So Grace picked away as fast as she could, nothing doubting but that her
cold thumbs were in some mysterious sense an offering on the shrine of
liberty; while soon the red handkerchief, duly secured, fluttered and
snapped in the brisk evening wind.

"Now you must hurrah, Gracie, and throw up your bonnet," said Dick, as
he descended from the pile.

"But won't it lodge down in some place in the wood pile?" suggested
Grace, thoughtfully.

"O, never fear; give it to me, and just holler now, Gracie, 'Hurrah for
liberty;' and we'll throw up your bonnet and my cap; and we'll play, you
know, that we are a whole army, and I'm General Washington."

So Grace gave up her little red hood, and Dick swung his cap, and up
they both went into the air; and the children shouted, and the flag
snapped and fluttered, and altogether they had a merry time of it. But
then the wind--good for nothing, roguish fellow!--made an ungenerous
plunge at poor Grace's little hood, and snipped it up in a twinkling,
and whisked it off, off, off,--fluttering and bobbing up and down, quite
across a wide, waste, snowy field, and finally lodged it on the top of a
tall, strutting rail, that was leaning, very independently, quite
another way from all the other