govern the ablative, and other valuable lore; but when I
asked the teacher where the Latin vernacular came in, she replied that
that would come to me later--that I must "open my mouth and shut my
eyes while she gave me something to make me wise." A solemn awe not
unmixed with envy pervaded the schoolroom as I, parrot-like, rattled
off this valueless jargon of a people dead for hundreds of years.

As this study possessed no interest for me, I naturally dropped into
mischief, and being caught one day with a distorted picture of the
teacher on my slate with the following suggestive poem lines beneath
it:--"Savage by name and savage by nature, I hope the Lord will take
your breath before you lick us all to death,"--I was chased about the
room by the angry pedagoguess until I leaped through the back window,
and the hole made in the bank by my head is pointed out to this day as
a warning to recalcitrant pupils.

[Illustration: "Floating 'Neath the Trees of Mill River."]

I refused to return to this temple of wisdom, and digging a hole into
the haymow, secreted myself therein, pulling the hole in after me.
Here I would remain during school hours, watching through a crevice
cut in the side of the barn, my father who made the air resound
with threats of what he would do if I did not at once return to my
education mill. Here I was often joined by a congenial spirit, and
we played cards which were regarded as the emissaries of Satan by my
religious parents; then we would sally forth with masked faces and
wooden guns, and inspired by dime novels, overthrow the walls of
children's playhouses, throw rocks against the schoolhouse, bully the
small boys almost into fits, hook the neighbors' eggs, corn, melons
and apples, which we devoured at leisure in a hidden hut in the woods.

When the spirit moved, we would "swipe" a neighbor's skiff and go
floating and paddling beneath the overarching trees of Mill River,
lazily watching the muskrats sliding down the banks and sporting
in the water or building their huts of mud, sticks and leaves; the
fish-hawk, plunging beneath the surface and emerging with a struggling
victim in his talons which he bore away to a tree-top to tear and eat;
then a timid wood duck casting suspicious glances as it glided across
a cove, secreting her little ones in the swamp; then a crane standing
on one long leg motionless as a statue, watching with half-closed eyes
for a mud-eel for its dinner.

Then we would