passers-by, all well known to me, the neighborhood cats that prowled
within doorways or upon house-tops, the swifts darting about in the warm
air, and the swallows skimming along the dusty street. . . . Oh! how
many hours have I spent at that window feeling like a caged sparrow, my
spirit filled with vague reverie; and meantime my ink-blotted copy-book
lay open before me, but no inspiration would come, and the composition
that I was engaged upon got itself finished very laboriously,--often not
at all.

And before long I began to play tricks upon the pedestrians, a fatal
result of my idleness over which I often felt remorseful.

I am bound to confess that my great friend Lucette was usually a willing
assistant in these pranks. Although now almost a young lady sixteen or
seventeen years of age, she was at times almost as much of a child as I.
"You must never tell any one!" she would say with an irrepressible smile
of mischief in her merry eyes (but I may tell now after so many years
have passed, now that the flowers of twenty summers have bloomed upon
her grave).

Our pranks consisted of taking cherry stems, plum stones and any sort
of trash, and wrapping them neatly into white or pink paper parcels that
looked very attractive to the eye; we then threw these bundles into the
street and hid ourselves behind the shutters to see who picked them up.

Sometimes we would write letters, impertinent or incoherent ones, with
accompanying drawings to illustrate the text; these we addressed to the
different eccentric people in our neighborhood, and, with the aid of
a thread, we lowered them to the sidewalk at about the same time these
persons were in the habit of passing. . . .