"meanie" was always ready to hide a big rock, or other disagreeable
foreign substance, under a particularly inviting bunch of leaves - then
watch and giggle at your discomfiture when you came innocently ploughing
along!

What a riot of wonderful color they made just after the first frosts had
turned their green to red and gold and brown! As a boy I disdained so
weak a thing as noticing the coloring on Big Hill - but now, in the
long-after years, I realize that its vivid Autumn garment was
indestructibly fixed in my memory and has lived - saved for me until I
could look back through Time's long glass and understand and love that
glorious picture. Not even the brush of a Barbizon master could tell the
story of Big Hill, three miles up the river from Main Street bridge,
gleaming in the hues that Jack Frost mixed, beneath the blue-gold dome
of a cloudless sky - for it could not paint the chatter of the squirrel,
or the glint of the bursting bittersweet berry, or the call of the crow,
or the crisp of the air, or the joy of life that only boyhood knows!



Getting in the Wood



An autumnal event of importance, second only to the filling of the
meat-house, was the purchase and sawing of the wood.

Three sizes, remember - the 4-foot lengths for the long, low stove in
the Big Room, 12-inch "chunks" for the oval sheet-iron stove in the
parlor, and the fine-split 18-inch lengths for the kitchen. (Yes, they