In the spring we hunted for mayflowers, and sailed boats in the
brooks, and gathered fluffy pussy-willows. We watched the yellow
dandelions come, one by one, in the short green grass, and we stood
under the maple-trees and watched the sap trickle from their trunks
into the great wooden buckets; for that maple sap was to be boiled
into maple sugar and syrup, and we liked to think about it. In the
summer we went strawberrying and blueberrying, and played "hide and
coop" behind the tall yellow haycocks, and rode on the top of the full
haycarts. In the fall we went nutting, and pressed red and yellow
autumn leaves between the pages of our great Webster's Dictionary; we
gathered apples, and watched the men at work at the cider-presses, and
the farmers as they threshed their wheat and husked their corn. And in
the winter we made snow men, and slid downhill from morning till night
when there was any snow to slide upon, and went sleighing behind our
dear old horse Jack, and roasted apples in the ashes of the great open
fire.

But one of the things we cared for most was our froggery, and we used
to play there for hours together in the long summer days.

Perhaps you don't know what a froggery is; but you do know what a frog
is, and so you can guess that a froggery is a place where frogs live.
My little sister and I used at first to catch the frogs and keep them
in tin cans filled with water; but when we thought about it we saw
that the poor froggies couldn't enjoy this, and that it was cruel to
take them away from their homes and make them live in unfurnished tin
houses. So one day I asked my father if he would give us a part of the
garden brook for our very own. He laughed, and said, "Yes," if we
wouldn't carry it away.