that it was a very silly one; and when I discovered that the rest
of the romantic occurrences she had related, not in that volume,
were to be found in "The Children of the Abbey," I left off
listening to her. I do not think I regarded her stories as lies;
I only lost my interest in them after I knew that they were all
of her own clumsy second-hand making-up, out of the most
commonplace material.

My two brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother
Ben pointed up to the gilded weather-cock on the Old South
steeple, and said to me with a very grave face,--

"Did you know that whenever that cock crows every rooster in town
crows too?" I listened out at the window, and asked,--

"But when will he begin to crow?"

"Oh, roosters crow in the night, sometimes, when you are asleep."

Then my younger brother would break in with a shout of delight at
my stupidity:--

"I'll tell you when, goosie!--

'The next day after never;
When the dead ducks fly over the river.'"

But this must have been when I was very small; for I remember
thinking that "the next day after never" would come some time, in
millions of years, perhaps. And how queer it would be to see dead