of ears of corn. I braided their soft fine silk for hair, and gave them
blankets as various as the scraps I found in my mother's workbag.

There was a little stranger with a black-and-yellow-striped coat that
used to come to the drying corn. It was a little ground squirrel, who
was so fearless of me that he came to one corner of the canvas and
carried away as much of the sweet corn as he could hold. I wanted very
much to catch him and rub his pretty fur back, but my mother said he
would be so frightened if I caught him that he would bite my fingers. So
I was as content as he to keep the corn between us. Every morning he
came for more corn. Some evenings I have seen him creeping about our
grounds; and when I gave a sudden whoop of recognition he ran quickly
out of sight.

When mother had dried all the corn she wished, then she sliced great
pumpkins into thin rings; and these she doubled and linked together
into long chains. She hung them on a pole that stretched between two
forked posts. The wind and sun soon thoroughly dried the chains of
pumpkin. Then she packed them away in a case of thick and stiff
buckskin.

In the sun and wind she also dried many wild fruits,--cherries, berries,
and plums. But chiefest among my early recollections of autumn is that
one of the corn drying and the ground squirrel.

I have few memories of winter days at this period of my life, though
many of the summer. There is one only which I can recall.

Some missionaries gave me a little bag of marbles. They were all sizes
and colors. Among them were some of colored glass. Walking with my